Shelby Steele Quotes

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

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

My black hero is and always will be Martin Luther King, not just because of the strength of his oratory but because his vision was very much the reality that I'd come to take for granted.

Boycotts have been a critical part of social justice in American history, particularly for African-Americans.

After Reconstruction, black newspapers evolved from being a propaganda arm into a kind of opposition press, because even the friends of former slaves had their fears.

I want to play Martin Luther King. That is absolutely a role and a character who is important to the landscape of the world that I really want to play.

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.

Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.

If Rosa Parks had not refused to move to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King.

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

During the 60's, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

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.

We have a tendency to sugar coat the Civil Rights movement by showing arm in arm and everyone singing 'Kumbaya'. We don't really always show the resistance from the government, the resistance from the status quo, from the majority to silence the movement.

You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud.' They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.

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

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.

Please tell the Attorney General that we have been cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off any more, we’ll be in the deep freeze. The Freedom Rides will go on.

My father joined the NAACP when he was 12, in the '50s. He was part of the organizing efforts that led to some of the first sit-ins in North Carolina.

The most dangerous thing in American society is a self-respecting and self-loving black person, because they're on the road to freedom and that means they're gonna run up against the powers that be.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was 'well timed,' according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This 'wait' has almost always meant 'never.' We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that 'justice too long delayed is justice denied.'

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

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.