Douglas Brinkley Quotes

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

I think young people don't really know that much about the Civil Rights Movement and about the history of African Americans in this country. It's not taught enough in school.

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

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.

I've always had sort of an interest in American history, full stop, and especially people who contributed to the civil rights struggle.

With 'Selma,' I grew up in Alabama, 45 minutes away from Selma. I have gone to that commemorative march many times with my parents.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

When I was younger, I had these romantic ideas about the Black Panther Party and what it meant to be a part of the civil rights movement. Then we're here, and it's dangerous. And it's dangerous to say, 'Black lives matter.'

Martin Luther King fought for blacks, and democratic whites were with him.

It was so crucial to the Civil Rights Movement that on June 23, 1963, Martin Luther King came to town, walked down Woodward Avenue with more than 100,000 people and delivered the first major public iteration of his "I Have A Dream" speech, two months before he did it in Washington.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

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.

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.

I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated.

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 loved Martin Luther King more than a brother.

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

My all-time heroes are Thurgood Marshall and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., two men who had to really work to achieve what they did. And I had the privilege of meeting them both.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of my personal heroes.

I was a child when the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King occurred, and I wanted to hear what was going on. I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to contribute in the best way I possibly could.

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