Keith Ellison Quotes

When you're fighting for civil rights, it's sometimes two steps forward and one step back. Civil rights are an evolution; and you have to bring people along.

I had very little exposure to business growing up. I also was very focused on the Civil Rights Movement. And I saw law as a vehicle to really bring about substantial change.

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.

I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.

I want some help on this. I'm being very honest, i want some ideas, as somebody who was arrested 50 years ago fighting for Civil Rights trying to desegregate schools in Chicago, who spent his whole life fighting against racism, I want your ideas. What do you think we can do? What can we do?

I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.

The task of youth is not only its own salvation but the salvation of those against whom it rebels.

What is accurately portrayed is the rich humanity not just of Martin Luther King but of the movement, which was a multiracial movement. You had blacks and whites coming together and sacrificing, organizing and mobilizing the world. That's the first time we've had collective action put at the center of any kind of portrayal of Martin King on the screen.

... the young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist.

Pick a movement, pick a revolution and join it.

A hashtag is not helping... A hashtag is not a movement. A hashtag does not make you Dr. King. A hashtag does not change anything. It's a hashtag.

What's more important is that we talk about movements; change happens through movements. The movement to end slavery, the movement to bring justice for those who have been left out of the system, movements to include women, movements around sexual preference - all these movements brought about change.

You can be active with the activists or sleep in with the sleepers while you're waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.

Do you know what social justice is? Do you know what social reform is? I didn't either, but reform and social justice are what I intend to do.

I'm part of an important movement that needs to happen.

When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn't immense work put in, and as if there wasn't immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; there were sustained movements behind them.

If you compromise in any kind of movement or any kind of wave of revolution, if you sort of play the game, things are gonna change far more slowly than you need them to.

What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.

When I wrote the song, The Way It Is, I wanted to move people to take a stand on civil rights in this country.

Social change comes through people.

We will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.

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

I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s and find a way to get in the way. To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.

My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.

Young people, throughout history, have always been the lifeblood of every movement for civil and human rights.