Marian Wright Edelman Quotes

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

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

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.

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.

Even after facing jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. courageously and boldly spoke out against racial inequality.

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

The time to end racial segregation in the South is upon us now.

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.

As the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case has shown us, separate is not always equal.

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

My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.

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.

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

My grandmother had been a part of the civil rights movement.

I came back to Louisville after the Olympics with my shiny gold medal. Went into a luncheonette where black folks couldn't eat. Thought I'd put them on the spot. I sat down and asked for a meal. The Olympic champion wearing his gold medal. They said, "We don't serve niggers here." I said, "That's okay, I don't eat 'em." But they put me out in the street. So I went down to the river, the Ohio River, and threw my gold medal in it.

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

In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

Rosa Parks' entire career has been one as working as a civil rights activist.

Bobby Darin was one of the first to take black musicians on the road with his band, and there were places that didn't want him to play, and he stood up to it.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

Well, I've been politically involved for a really long time. Growing up in the segregated South, it was a very painful experience for me to live through the open racism of the time.

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.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Civil Rights Act.

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.