Jaime Harrison Quotes

It was natural to see the struggle for dignity for black people in America as a sister struggle of the Jewish struggle. So growing up, it was always a part of my breakfast cereal to think of myself as someone who was part of a larger struggle.

I loved Martin Luther King more than a brother.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Civil Rights Act.

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.

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.

Many civil rights came about, not when they were passed into law, but because the federal government did what it should and saw them enforced.

It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.

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.

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

There are those who say to you we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years too late.

The time to end racial segregation in the South is upon us now.

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 cannot sit by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

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

The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.

It's good that segregation is over.

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.

I've always had sort of an interest in American history, full stop, and especially people who contributed to the civil rights struggle.

As the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case has shown us, separate is not always equal.

The civil rights movement didn't end on August 6, 1965. It continued because the work of creating a truly equal country never ends.

I grew up reading Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.

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

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" - one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.