Jesse Jackson Quotes

Women were once considered chattel, and slavery was regarded as sanctioned in the Bible. However, western society grew to recognize that neither was just.

We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.

I'd like to think I would have signed the Civil Rights bill and wouldn't have had any issues with it.

The institution of slavery in U. S. A. was Christian, and Christianity was slave-holding there.

… moral ideas are not fixed. The attitude of public opinion towards slavery was completely changed in twenty or thirty years.

I do not believe as Martin Luther King did, that the arc of history bends towards justice. I see the arc of history bending towards chaos or the unknown.

The civil rights movement didn't end on August 6, 1965. It continued because the work of creating a truly equal country never ends.

I would want to go back to the civil rights movement and see how that was. With the information and knowledge I have about it now, I would want to see how I would deal with it.

The fact is this: NASA was desegregated by a white male. NASA was not desegregated by a black male. NASA was not desegregated by white women.

Take the US. Women were not even able to vote until 90 ago, at about the same time they gained the right in Afghanistan. Rights of former slaves were very limited until the 1960s, and in some ways still are. In these and other domains there has been progress in democracy, though still seriously flawed. In other dimensions - the control of concentrated wealth over the political process, for example, things have gotten much worse in recent years. And there is much more, in both directions.

You can't put civil rights on the ballot.

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.

You grow up with a heightened sense of the Civil Rights Movement, but I think it wasn't until I became of age that I really had a great appreciation for the struggle that took place.

People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We're clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven't reached true democracy yet.

In every era going back to Lincoln with Frederick Douglass, presidents talk to those that were leading at that time.

I think that the thing that we learned back in the day of the civil rights movement is that you do have to keep on keeping on.

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

The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness.

The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.

Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man's skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of the white - you must steal them out by teaching, illustration, and example.

What gets lost is that the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.

The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.

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

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

Let me go over this again on the reclaiming the civil rights movement. People of faith that believe that you have an equal right to justice - that is the essence. And if it's not the essence, then we've been sold a pack of lies. The essence is everyone deserves a shot - the content of character, not the color of skin.