Tavis Smiley Quotes

I'm thinking about some developments say in the 80s when the anti-apartheid movement began to claim more support and strength within the US. Black trade unionists played a really important role in developing this US anti-apartheid movement.

The South actually has a very strong tradition of activism. The civil rights movement came from down here! It was black activists demanding that their voices be heard. People say these are red states. No they're not!

The Black Panther party of Self-Defense is a revolutionary party.

The Black Panther Party was not a gang. They grew out of a young black intelligentsia on college campuses.

Black power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their questions about it.

Electoral politics was always an objective of the Black Panther party, so Barack Obama is a part of what we dreamed and struggled and died for.

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.

I was involved in the civil rights movement way back in the late '50s and through the '60s and '70s. I was doing a civil rights musical here in Los Angeles and we sang at one of the rallies where Dr. Martin Luther King spoke, and I remember the thrill I felt when we were introduced to him. To have him shake your hand was an absolutely unforgettable experience. Even before I could vote, I was involved in the political arena.

When the students in the South, the blacks, started demonstrating, that was the beginning of the time of students becoming a social force around the world.

UCLA acknowledged this shift by bringing in Alex Haley (the co-author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X) and Eldridge Cleaver (Soul on Ice) as speakers.

Martin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don't know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday.

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.

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.

My father has a pragmatic mind. He marched with Dr. King in the '60s, and he's very much for women's rights.

There are people who went to prison, died, gave their life so Obama could be president of the United States.

Jackie Robinson, as an athlete and as someone who was trying to make a stand for equality, he was exemplary.

One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.

If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.

There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue. They didn't just stand up and salute when told to go to war. Women finally began to realize a more equal place in our society.

I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.

Rosa Parks will be remembered for her lasting contributions to society. Her legacy lives on in the continued struggle for civil rights around the world. She will be missed.

The civil rights movement would experience many important victories, but Rosa Parks will always be remembered as its catalyst.

It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere.

I had been involved in the March on Washington in 1963. I was with friends carrying a sign, 'Protestants, Jews and Catholics for Civil Rights.'

The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.