James A. Forbes Quotes

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. made me very, very sad, and I mourned and I cried like many of our citizens did.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

Even after facing jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. courageously and boldly spoke out against racial inequality.

You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr., and not think of death. You might hear the words 'I have a dream,' but they will doubtlessly only serve to underscore an image of a simple motel balcony, a large man made small, a pool of blood. For as famous as he may have been in life, it is - and was - death that ultimately defined him.

I lost two of the greatest men I've ever known to assassination - and a son to suicide.

I remember when Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was up early watching television and watched the announcement. I didn't understand what the word 'assassinated' meant.

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too.

In the South in the 1960’s you lived in a state of terrorism if your skin was black.

I’m letting the world know, my sister didn’t die for freedom. My sister died because they put a bomb in that church and they murdered her.

When Thurgood Marshall went to a Southern town to try a case, he didn't know whether he would be alive at the end of the day.

I'm old enough to have lived through a time when Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and others died so people of color could vote.

The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere following Gandhi's assassination.

Let me speak frankly: separate but equal is a fraud. It is the language that tried to push Rosa Parks to the back of the bus. It is the motif that determined that black and white people could not possibly drink from the same water fountain, eat at the same table or use the same toilets.

I realized that my grandfather walked with Martin Luther King forty years ago. That was his dream. And in his little way, he helped us get closer to where we are today.

There were three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, and Rosa Parks had missed the first one. Parks, whose act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, moved to Detroit two years later for safety reasons.

The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.

Dr. King's general principles are universal. But the things he confronted took place in another era.

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.

I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement.

I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.

I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.

In '42,' it's like the '40s where racial equality had come into the consciousness of a lot of people, whereas in the 1900s it was sort of a new thing.

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

I grew up in the 1970s, but I don't think a whole lot had changed from the '60s. Oh, it had changed in the law books - but not in the kitchens of white homes.

I am really enjoying the new Martin Luther King Jr stamp - just think about all those white bigots, licking the backside of a black man.