Burgess Owens Quotes

Booker Washington was branded an accommodationist by many of the people who criticized him.

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.

Lincoln’s talking nigger citizenship!

Washington [Booker T. Washington] bartered away much that was not his to barter. Certainly I did not believe that the skills of an artisan bricklayer, plasterer, or shoemaker, and the good farmer would cause the white South, grimly busy with disfranchisement and separation, to change the direction of things. I realized the need for what Washington was doing. Yet it seemed to me he was giving up essential ground that would be hard to win back.

Booker Washington was essentially the head Republican boss in the South. He was a power broker.

Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all.

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.

Du Bois marked a great stage in the history of Negro struggles when he said that Negroes could no longer accept the subordination which Booker T. Washington had preached.

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.

In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.

When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights.

I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s.

The first African-American leader was Dr. Martin Luther King.

I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.

A lot of things happened in a lot of places. And to see how well it was handled in Atlanta. There are a lot of reasons for Atlanta being a special town in the Civil Rights era.

Being so closely related to the South, barbecue was part of segregation and helped defeat it.

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.

I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.

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

History did not end in 1965. Largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.

Booker T. Washington was a very vindictive man…. Staff would have to get his permission before they married.

What we fly today is not an enduring symbol of our heritage, but the fighting flag of those who wanted to preserve a segregated South.

the most damnable outrage ever perpetrated by any citizen of the United States when he invited a nigger to dine with him at the White House.

Once the clutch of Jim Crow had loosened, opponents of civil rights shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda …. Fusing anxiety about crime to anxiety over racial change and riots, civil rights and racial disorder—initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement—were defined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.