Stephanie Rawlings-Blake Quotes

Yet and still, Peter Norman took into account that the aboriginals were suffering just as much in Australia as Blacks in the United States were suffering.

We have two boys. After George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, we had to explain to our older son, who was 12 at the time, how that could happen. Instead of hugging and consoling him, my husband pulled out a documentary about Emmett Till and showed it to him and started to talk about how the justice system works in this country - and how it often doesn't. From that conversation, our son wrote a short story about Trayvon Martin going to heaven to meet Emmett Till.

I talked to a lot of Black Lives activists in various states. What I learned is that the relationship of police departments around the country with the black community is far, far more severe and awful than I had originally known.

This Civil Rights Act is a challenge to all of us to go to work in our communities and our states, in our homes and in our hearts, to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country. So tonight I urge every public official, every religious leader, every business and professional man, every working man, every housewife - I urge every American - to join in this effort to bring justice and hope to all our people, and to bring peace to our land.

I fully understand that the African-American community has suffered from discrimination and that there are many wrongs that must still be made right.

I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence.

The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

Negroes aren't seeking anything which is not good for the nation as well as ourselves. In order for America to be 100 percent strong -- economically, defensively and morally -- we cannot afford the waste of having second- and third-class citizens.

Pigmentation was a quick and convenient way of judging a person. One of us, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once proposed we instead judge people by the content of their character. He was shot.

I will not take 'but' for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy's 'but' too long.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

Protesting the color of a man's skin is not a worthy protest.

Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deepseated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.

We've got to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system.

I have a long history in fighting for civil rights. I understand that many people in the African-American community may not understand that.

It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.

Until racial justice and freedom is a reality in this land, our union will remain profoundly imperfect.... The Negro is going to get justice or this society will be ripped apart.

The doublespeak of the American neoconservatives who conjured up the term "reverse racism" (was) to attack those who fought against White supremacy. This so-called ‘colorblind’ ideology has reversed the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and is actually commonsense among White Americans. It informs policymakers from the White House to the Supreme Court and has been used to justify the retreat from egalitarianism.

The only part of my mother's experience that still gets to me is the way she and people like her were looked down upon for asking America to be America, for asking for full and equal participation in our democracy.

I couldn't see why a black man wasn't allowed to drink out of the same water fountain or sit in the same bus or go to the same schools as a white guy.

For black politicians, civil rights organizations and white liberals to support the racist practices of the University of Michigan amounts to no less than a gross betrayal of the civil rights principles of our historic struggle from slavery to the final guarantee of constitutional rights to all Americans. Indeed, it was practices like those of the University of Michigan, but against blacks, that were the focal point of much of the civil rights movement.

As I like to say to the people in Montgomery: "The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.

The patter of their feet as they walk through Jim Crow barriers to attend school is the thunder of the marching men of Joshua, and the world rocks beneath their tread.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.