Harold H. Greene Quotes

On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Its enactment, following the longest continuous debate in the history of the U.S. Senate, enshrined into law the basic principle upon which our country was founded - that all people are created equal.

It was a privilege to serve as the assistant attorney general for civil rights, a role that allowed me to enforce the Civil Rights Act and help make its promise a reality.

If I were attorney general in Kansas in 1953, I would not have defended a Kansas statute that put in place separate-but-equal facilities.

Essentially, Eisenhower passed on to his successors the problem of guaranteeing constitutional rights to Negro citizens.

Tomorrow morning, we’re going to try to integrate the University of Mississippi. Get me a memo on … what we can do if the governor sends the National Guard there. Have it on my desk at 8 in the morning.

The Civil Rights Bill is a massive assault on the Constitutional system … a bill far more drastic than any bill ever presented even during the days of Reconstruction.

My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the nineteen-sixties.

School integration did not come to be the day after the Brown ruling was issued. Progress took years, and it took passion, strength, and courage from a large group of committed individuals.

There was never a time you could get the majority of people in Alabama or Mississippi, or even southern Delaware, to vote to end segregation. What changed things was the rule of law, the courts. Brown v. Board of Education was ushered in by a movement, but it was a legal decision.

My earliest memories are when my father was the attorney general at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. We would go to visit him at the Justice Department and take the tunnel over to the FBI building and watch the sharpshooters at practice.

In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.

The so called Negro Movement is part of the attempted takeover of our country by the lazy, the indolent, the beatnicks and by some misguided religionists and bleeding hearts.

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

The New Deal ultimately undermined Jim Crow’s prospects. The very legislation embraced by Southern segregationists created at first mere chinks, then whole openings for social change that were grasped by an incipient, soon powerful, movement for equal rights for Blacks.

The Civil Rights Movement is in transition from protest to politics, and in politics compromise is necessary.

I learned a lot about evasiveness, and how racists could use a system to forestall equality. I also learned a lot riding those dusty roads and walking into those sullen hostile courts in Jackson, Mississippi. It just seems that unless something's pushed, unless you litigate, nothing happens.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was vigorously and vociferously opposed by the Southern states. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law nonetheless.

If segregationists had their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate today, I would not be a top contender to be president of the United States.

What I did at Ole Miss had nothing to do with going to classes. My objective was to destroy the system of white supremacy.

There's the phrase of 'making America great again,' but how did we make America great? Who did it? It was Thurgood Marshall who did it. It was Thurgood Marshall who made America live up to its constitution, to its dream. He pushed the envelope to make sure that we were equal.

The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.

It's good that segregation is over.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.