C. L. R. James Quotes

When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights.

I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.

As a child, I lived through and survived the segregated South. I sat at the back of the bus at a time when America wasn't yet as great as it could be. As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future.

My black hero is and always will be Martin Luther King, not just because of the strength of his oratory but because his vision was very much the reality that I'd come to take for granted.

I want to play Martin Luther King. That is absolutely a role and a character who is important to the landscape of the world that I really want to play.

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

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

The first African-American leader was Dr. Martin Luther King.

I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes.

You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud.' They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.

Negro President

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

Black people have been fighting for basic citizenship rights since the inception of the country.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.

Through protest - especially in the 1950s and '60s - we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.

'Mudbound' highlights the fact that we're still battling a lot of the same issues as we were all of those decades ago.

I used to say, 'We've always had integration in the South... we just want it now in the daytime.

When you live in the South, you're constantly part of the civil rights movement.

It took the United States Army to get one Negro into the University of Mississippi; it took troops to get a few Negroes in the white schools at Little Rock and another dozen places in the South.

Southern change gonna come at last! Now your crosses are burning fast, Southern Man.

Only time [JF] Kennedy made any, took any action to even look like he identified with negroes was when he was forced to. Kennedy didn't even make his speech based on this problem being a moral issue until Negroes exploded in Birmingham.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

It is so painful to suggest that we go back to think about these days where an African-American could not be a citizen of the United States.

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

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.