David Garrow Quotes

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

Hip-hop has done more for race relations than most cultural icons; and I say save Martin Luther King, because his 'I Have A Dream' speech was realized when Obama was elected into office.

The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.

If someone had told me in 1963 that in 50 years we would see a Black man in the white house, I would have said “You’re crazy! You are not living in the real world.”

Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama's running so we all can fly.

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

Our nation has come so far since 1968 when Dr. King was assassinated, but I know we can do better to achieve The Dream, and that is why I keep marching on.

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.

The fact that we elected Obama was a sign that the black struggle inherent in the blues and so much of the music I have loved can triumph.

In the Fifties, there were certain places we couldn't ride on the bus, and now there is a possibility of a black man being in the White House. You have to feel good about it.

If you ask me whether the election of Barack Obama is the fulfillment of Dr. King's dream, I say, 'No, it's just a down payment.'

If it hadn't been for that march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, there would be no Barack Obama as President of the United States of America.

Obama is the first African-American president, and for some people, that means a great deal, and for some people, it means very little.

I always believed there would be an African-American president. It was something I'd dreamed about, thought about, but certainly did not believe would happen in my lifetime.

It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.

Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

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

Dr. King's famous 'I Have a Dream' speech was delivered at 'The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,' a call to justice beyond the traditional civil rights movement's focus.

All Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. King for his bravery and commitment to civil rights and nonviolence that changed this nation - and world - for the better.

I think the legacy of the civil rights movement is that now whites are more open to being represented by people of color or people who are women or, again, non-traditional candidates.

If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.

The very fact that Barack Obama - an African-American - was twice elected to the presidency will always be the lead line in that hard-to-meld, gold-plated paragraph.

In my wildest dreams, I never would have thought we'd come to the point where were talking about the re-election of a black president.

Martin Luther King was a leader for all Americans on our own professed values.

Among the many international consequences of Barack Obama's stunning victory in the United States is worldwide introspection about whether such a breakthrough could happen elsewhere. Could a person of color win power in other white-majority countries?