Langston Hughes Quotes

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

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

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

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.

A little old lady sitting at the front of the bus can do nothing to change civil rights.

I think the Montgomery bus boycott initiated an era of self-determination.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

Has he paid his dues? Is he black enough? John Lewis and I were out there marching and organizing sit-ins back in the '60s so that his children and my children would not have to do it. We would have been failures if had to do the same things we did.

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.

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.

Even after facing jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. courageously and boldly spoke out against racial inequality.

When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn't immense work put in, and as if there wasn't immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; there were sustained movements behind them.

What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.

But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

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

My earliest memories are of the civil rights era. My earliest experiences were rage.

I think the NAACP isn't recognized enough for all of the work it does, especially in the field of law. They may have faded from view over the last couple of decades, but they are fighting the good fight.

For a black student to work in southwest Mississippi for example - or in the Delta in 1960, 1961, 1962 - was high-risk work.

I learned a lot about evasiveness, and how racists could use a system to forestall equality. I also learned a lot riding those dusty roads and walking into those sullen hostile courts in Jackson, Mississippi. It just seems that unless something's pushed, unless you litigate, nothing happens.

I want you to leave here with a sense of mission. Martin Luther King is waiting for you to march with him.

We come to Selma to be renewed. We come to be inspired. We come to be reminded that we must do the work that justice and equality calls us to do.

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

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.

John Lewis inspired countless Americans across generations with a life dedicated to service and getting into 'good trouble.' He had a vision for a better America, shouldered the weight of change, and put his own safety on the line so that others could live with dignity and grace.

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