Dan Wakefield Quotes

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

The civil rights movement would experience many important victories, but Rosa Parks will always be remembered as its catalyst.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.

Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.

I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.

I had been involved in the March on Washington in 1963. I was with friends carrying a sign, 'Protestants, Jews and Catholics for Civil Rights.'

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.

We have a fabulous civil rights history here in Birmingham.

I realized that my grandfather walked with Martin Luther King forty years ago. That was his dream. And in his little way, he helped us get closer to where we are today.

The Civil Rights Movement, it wasn't just a couple of, you know, superstars like Martin Luther King. It was thousands and thousands - millions, I should say - of people taking risks, becoming leaders in their community.

I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement.

When I was 15 years old and in the tenth grade, I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at that time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change.

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.

When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn't immense work put in, and as if there wasn't immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; there were sustained movements behind them.

If Rosa Parks had not refused to move to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

My parents were very active in the Civil Rights Movement. My father was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker; my mother was a secretary with the Panthers.

During the 60's, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

The legal difference between the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders was significant.

Martin Luther King told American Blacks not to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.

I've always had sort of an interest in American history, full stop, and especially people who contributed to the civil rights struggle.

I think every high school student who was alert during the early '60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement.