Tom Perez Quotes

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

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.

My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.

For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

Bobby Darin was one of the first to take black musicians on the road with his band, and there were places that didn't want him to play, and he stood up to it.

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

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.

You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too.

The March on Washington affirmed our values as a people: equality and opportunity for all. Forty-one years ago, during a time of segregation, these were an ideal.

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

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

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

One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.

By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back in the image of God and democracy.

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

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.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities…. This nation … will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

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

There has been far too much hypocrisy in the field of civil rights. It is easy enough to give rousing speeches or call for legislation which has no possibility of passage.

I think if people really read Martin Luther King, Jr., then they would begin to understand what he really represented.

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

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

My grandmother had been a part of the civil rights movement.

I came back to Louisville after the Olympics with my shiny gold medal. Went into a luncheonette where black folks couldn't eat. Thought I'd put them on the spot. I sat down and asked for a meal. The Olympic champion wearing his gold medal. They said, "We don't serve niggers here." I said, "That's okay, I don't eat 'em." But they put me out in the street. So I went down to the river, the Ohio River, and threw my gold medal in it.