David Harewood Quotes

I want to play Martin Luther King. That is absolutely a role and a character who is important to the landscape of the world that I really want to play.

When I was 15 years old and in the tenth grade, I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at that time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change.

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

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

I realized that my grandfather walked with Martin Luther King forty years ago. That was his dream. And in his little way, he helped us get closer to where we are today.

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.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

The first African-American leader was Dr. Martin Luther King.

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.

If Rosa Parks had not refused to move to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King.

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

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 saw my father march with Martin Luther King

I have a lot of respect for Martin Luther King. I think he was one of the greatest orators that the country ever produced.

Through protest - especially in the 1950s and '60s - we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.

I think if people really read Martin Luther King, Jr., then they would begin to understand what he really represented.

I don't remember when I didn't know about Martin Luther King.

I grew up reading Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

As a civil rights leader, Mrs. King's vision of racial peace and nonviolent social change was a fortifying staple in advancing the civil rights movement.

There were three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, and Rosa Parks had missed the first one. Parks, whose act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, moved to Detroit two years later for safety reasons.

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.

Dr. King's general principles are universal. But the things he confronted took place in another era.

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.