Bill Ayers Quotes

The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.

The Civil Rights Movement also reaffirmed me as a singer. It taught me that singing was not entertainment, it was something else.

Rosa Parks was primed, she had the Civil Rights Movement behind her, she didn't just decide to sit on the bus, it was strategic.

The civil rights movement didn't begin in Montgomery and it didn't end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.

It is our hope that when people read "March" - Book One, Book Two, and Book Three - that they will understand that another generation of people, especially young people, were deeply inspired by the work of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and many others.

[Rosa Louise] Parks used to say, "Everybody looks at me because I sat down once in Montgomery, but the real hero is a woman named Septima Clark."She created the Citizenship Schools [where civil-rights activists taught basic literacy and political education classes].

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

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

What Martin Luther King is doing is disarming the black people of America of their God-given right and of their natural right.

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.

If the Negro is to achieve the goal of integration, he must organize himself into a militant and nonviolent mass movement.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

The advent of the civil rights movement during the 50s and 60s made it very plain crystal clear to me that we had an obligation to do what we could to make real the Constitution of the United States of America.

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.

Until the Negro votes on a large scale, we will have to rely more and more on mass direct action as the one realistic political weapon.

Historically, mass demonstrations have worked best at shifting public opinion and pressuring the powers-that-be when organizers highlighted one concrete demand: 'Bring Our Boys Home from Vietnam'; 'End Segregation Now'; 'Support Women's Right to Choose.'

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was more politically oriented. Part and parcel of the initial SNCC efforts was to not only go in for voter registration, but for political participation.

I have never seen white people who would sit, who would, who would approach a solution to their own problems nonviolently or passively. It's only when they are so-called "fighting for the rights of Negroes" that they nonviolently, passively, and lovingly, you know, approach the situation.

The time will come when the Negro in the South will be accorded all the political rights which his ability, character, and material possessions entitle him to.

I was involved with the anti-apartheid movement through my work as an artist and also through my political commitment.

These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads walking round.

It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.

The anniversary of the Montgomery boycott was being celebrated, and the handbill that was out, and all whatever literature that was circulated, didn't say practically anything about movement or what the movement stood for, what it had done, or anything, but was simply adulation of the leader, you know, [Martin Luther] King.

Martin Luther King really was a safety valve for white people. Any time it appeared that the black community was on the verge of really doing what we ought to do based on having been attacked, they put Martin Luther King on television. He was always saying, "We must use nonviolence. We must overcome hate with love." White people loved that. That's why they gave him a Nobel Prize. But when Martin Luther King started condemning the Vietnam War, that's when white people turned against him.