Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.

Civil rights happened because youth got involved. The youth stood up and helped to break the pattern that their parents had got accustomed to living. The next generation has to take that stand for whatever it is, socially, that they are involved in.

You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too.

The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.

One of the best ways to kill a civil rights concept is to pass a law and not enforce it.

I’ve never been involved in a Civil Rights campaign that was not ill-timed

Civil rights activists and union activists shared not just common values and objectives but also common enemies.

It's what the people wanted at the time, but the country could not be half-segregated and half-integrated, just as it could not be half-slave and half-free back in the 1800s.

The day that the black man takes an uncompromising step and realizes that he's within his rights, when his own freedom is being jeopardized, to use any means necessary to bring about his freedom or put a halt to that injustice, I don't think he'll be by himself.

In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.

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.

You can't put civil rights on the ballot.

I feel like in 10 or 15 years' time our children are going to look back and say, 'What? You were around when gay people weren't allowed to get married?'

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.

Martin Luther King took us to the mountain top: I want to take us to the bank.

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

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.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.

It was natural to see the struggle for dignity for black people in America as a sister struggle of the Jewish struggle. So growing up, it was always a part of my breakfast cereal to think of myself as someone who was part of a larger struggle.

The ideals and principles for which Dr King fought have never been forgotten and are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago.

No change can come if those who are impacted the most by discrimination are not willing to stand up for themselves.

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

It's the need for change that drives us to join forces with our brothers and sisters all around the world - but change is slow.

The social issues outside of football are not as defined as they were earlier, when integration took place and certain rights were legislated. The Civil Rights movement is over. Individuals can buy homes wherever they want, travel first class wherever they want, eat wherever they want.