Bryan Stevenson Quotes

In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.

The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.

The complete destruction of all enforced segregation is now in sight.

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.

Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.

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.

We Americans entered a new phase in our history - the era of integration - in 1954.

Civil rights was not an impossible dream. Thousands of brave African Americans stepped forward to make it happen.

We've had a great change. Dr King saw to that. I was so grateful to see the 'colored only' signs come off the water fountains and bathrooms in the south. But the struggle lives on.

Mrs. Parks' act of brave defiance rocked the foundation of American society and inspired generations of civil rights leaders and created a sense of hope for every American facing legal discrimination in this country.

In the Brown decision, the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck down the legal and moral footing of racially segregated public education in this country.

Many civil rights came about, not when they were passed into law, but because the federal government did what it should and saw them enforced.

The 1957 crisis in Little Rock, brought about by the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, was a huge part of the march toward freedom and opportunity in America.

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

Even here in America, people are fighting for civil rights 45 years after the civil rights movement.

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

The civil rights movement would experience many important victories, but Rosa Parks will always be remembered as its catalyst.

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.

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

The legal difference between the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders was significant.

By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back in the image of God and democracy.

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

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.

It's good that segregation is over.