Clementa C. Pinckney Quotes

There are people who went to prison, died, gave their life so Obama could be president of the United States.

Many have fought for and even lost their lives to end segregation, to win the right to vote. It disappoints me to now have to cajole people to register and to vote.

The right to vote is the most powerful non-violent tool we have in the struggle for civil rights.

We live in a nation that spent centuries denying the right to vote to the poor, to women, and to people of color.

We got the vote, which we should've been born with, in 1920. Everything we've had to struggle for - it's ridiculous.

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

Suffrage is the pivotal right.

The right to vote is the right upon which all of our rights are leveraged - and without which none can be protected.

A man without a vote is in this land like a man without a hand.

The right to vote with no ifs, ands, or buts, that's the key. When the Negroes get that, they'll have every politician, north and south, east and west, kissing their ass, begging for their support.

Secure to all people a free exercise of the right of suffrage and every other civil right.

Our Ancestors prayed for 389 years to place a person of color in the White House. They led over 200 slave revolts, fought in 11 wars, one being a civil war where over 600,000 people died. Our mothers fought and were killed for women’s suffrage, our grandparents were lynched for the civil rights bill of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965…my father never had the opportunity to vote and I believe it is my sacred duty to pull the lever for every member of my family who was denied the right to vote. I will not allow narrow-minded ministers or regressive politicians the satisfaction of keeping me from my sacred right to vote to shape the future for my grandchildren.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.

When you live in the South, you're constantly part of the civil rights movement.

You can't put civil rights on the ballot.

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.

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.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage. If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one.

When I was 15 years old and in the tenth grade, I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at that time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change.

I loved Martin Luther King more than a brother.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of my personal heroes.

When and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law?

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.

One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.