George C. Wallace Quotes

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

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.

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

In the summer of 1964, my sister and I went to South Ballston, Virginia, to stay with my aunt and her kids. They passed the civil rights bill that summer; my cousins were so happy because now they could swim in the pool.

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

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

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.

Desegregation is a joke.

The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.

The complete destruction of all enforced segregation is now in sight.

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.

Let me say … how deeply grateful all people of good will are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality.

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

The New Deal ultimately undermined Jim Crow’s prospects. The very legislation embraced by Southern segregationists created at first mere chinks, then whole openings for social change that were grasped by an incipient, soon powerful, movement for equal rights for Blacks.

My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.

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

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.

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.

If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.

Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.

In '42,' it's like the '40s where racial equality had come into the consciousness of a lot of people, whereas in the 1900s it was sort of a new thing.

We've had a great change. Dr King saw to that. I was so grateful to see the 'colored only' signs come off the water fountains and bathrooms in the south. But the struggle lives on.

Rejecting the fundamental provision of the Civil Rights Act is a rejection of the foundational promise of America that all men and women should be treated equally, a promise for which many Americans have lost their lives.

Brown v. Board helped unite us all, and gave us all great pride knowing we all are truly E Pluribus Unum - one people out of many.