Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

Even here in America, people are fighting for civil rights 45 years after the civil rights movement.

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

Boycotts have been a critical part of social justice in American history, particularly for African-Americans.

Martin Luther King would celebrate the symbolic status (of having a black president), but he would examine what the real substance was. And if he saw that poor and working people were not at the center of public policy, he would be deeply, deeply upset.

A little old lady sitting at the front of the bus can do nothing to change civil rights.

Has he paid his dues? Is he black enough? John Lewis and I were out there marching and organizing sit-ins back in the '60s so that his children and my children would not have to do it. We would have been failures if had to do the same things we did.

That was exciting to be able to comment on civil rights. I mean, the civil rights movement that young people don't know about today, but Martin Luther King was considered by the establishment press in the early years of the sit-in movement as a dangerous man, and he was the equivalent at that time as Malcolm X. And he was told to stop his demonstrations; they were against the law and all of that. Now that he's sainted and sanctified we've forgotten.

This is Not Another Revolution. This is a Civil Rights Movement

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.

The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.

What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.

By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back in the image of God and democracy.

Please tell the Attorney General that we have been cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off any more, we’ll be in the deep freeze. The Freedom Rides will go on.

I want you to leave here with a sense of mission. Martin Luther King is waiting for you to march with him.

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.

I grew up reading Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.

My father joined the NAACP when he was 12, in the '50s. He was part of the organizing efforts that led to some of the first sit-ins in North Carolina.

I want some help on this. I'm being very honest, i want some ideas, as somebody who was arrested 50 years ago fighting for Civil Rights trying to desegregate schools in Chicago, who spent his whole life fighting against racism, I want your ideas. What do you think we can do? What can we do?

It is my hope that people today will see that, in another time, in another period, when we saw the need for people to speak up, to organize, to mobilize, and to do something about injustice, we came together.

These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads walking round.

If I wanted to fight to make a better world racially, I wouldn't be in the music business. You dig, if I were going to be a freedom fighter music is the wrong field.

The civil rights movement didn't begin in Montgomery and it didn't end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.