Nate Parker Quotes

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

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

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.

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.

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

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.

This is how a revolution begins. It begins when someone grows tired of standing idly by, waiting for history's arc to bend toward justice, and instead decides to give it a swift shove. It begins when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in the segregated South.

In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.

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

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

I’ve never been involved in a Civil Rights campaign that was not ill-timed

Rosa Parks showed us all that one little person can make a whole bunch of noise without so much as a whisper.

Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing. This time they were taking the initiative.

I must admit that this is a deliberate attempt to dramatize conditions in this city and state. We’re going to turn Selma upside down and inside out in order to make it right side up.

I was forced away from the plantation because I wouldn't go back and withdraw, you know, my literacy test after I had tried to take it. I wouldn't go back.

I had developed a specifically calculated plan to break the system of white supremacy. My theory was that since Mississippi was the place, this was the ultimate: Mississippi was the place you had to break it.