Leah Ward Sears Quotes

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.

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

I never pursued anything but acting. But as a kid, I was really interested in the Supreme Court. I wanted to to be a Supreme Court justice, but didn't want to be a lawyer. I just wanted to go straight to being a justice.

In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.

All Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. King for his bravery and commitment to civil rights and nonviolence that changed this nation - and world - for the better.

I've become very fond of the law. I've always been an advocate for justice, which occasionally the law brings to light.

Everything that we are about as African people in terms of our struggle for justice and freedom started in the church. There is no separation of the sacred and secular—of the church and state—in Black America. There is no separation.

The doublespeak of the American neoconservatives who conjured up the term "reverse racism" (was) to attack those who fought against White supremacy. This so-called ‘colorblind’ ideology has reversed the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and is actually commonsense among White Americans. It informs policymakers from the White House to the Supreme Court and has been used to justify the retreat from egalitarianism.

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

A lawyer's either a social engineer or he's a parasite on society.

Tell them, please, that I am deeply humbled by the goodwill, the self discipline, the courage, the wisdom of this group of Montgomery Negroes.

The so called Negro Movement is part of the attempted takeover of our country by the lazy, the indolent, the beatnicks and by some misguided religionists and bleeding hearts.

The New Deal ultimately undermined Jim Crow’s prospects. The very legislation embraced by Southern segregationists created at first mere chinks, then whole openings for social change that were grasped by an incipient, soon powerful, movement for equal rights for Blacks.

In approaching this problem [school desegregation], we cannot turn the clock back...

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 do not believe as Martin Luther King did, that the arc of history bends towards justice. I see the arc of history bending towards chaos or the unknown.

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.

There's the phrase of 'making America great again,' but how did we make America great? Who did it? It was Thurgood Marshall who did it. It was Thurgood Marshall who made America live up to its constitution, to its dream. He pushed the envelope to make sure that we were equal.

There was never a time you could get the majority of people in Alabama or Mississippi, or even southern Delaware, to vote to end segregation. What changed things was the rule of law, the courts. Brown v. Board of Education was ushered in by a movement, but it was a legal decision.

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.

I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases.

All of you are aware of the tragic history of racism in America, but for a very long time, African-Americans and their white allies came together and they struggled and they stood up for justice and they stood up to lynching and they stood up to segregation and the stood up to a nation where African-Americans couldn't even vote in America.

Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you...take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.

All of the legal defense funds out there, they're looking for people out there with court of appeals experience, because court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know, I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don't make law, I know. I know.

Many well-meaning intelligent people have argued since the May 17, 1954, decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools that communication between the races has broken down.