Jonathan Kozol Quotes

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.

The Civil Rights Movement, it wasn't just a couple of, you know, superstars like Martin Luther King. It was thousands and thousands - millions, I should say - of people taking risks, becoming leaders in their community.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.

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

I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement.

When I was 15 years old and in the tenth grade, I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at that time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change.

We've had a great change. Dr King saw to that. I was so grateful to see the 'colored only' signs come off the water fountains and bathrooms in the south. But the struggle lives on.

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

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.

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.

I realized that my grandfather walked with Martin Luther King forty years ago. That was his dream. And in his little way, he helped us get closer to where we are today.

The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.

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.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

You grow up with a heightened sense of the Civil Rights Movement, but I think it wasn't until I became of age that I really had a great appreciation for the struggle that took place.

Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.

Civil rights was not an impossible dream. Thousands of brave African Americans stepped forward to make it happen.

If Rosa Parks had not refused to move to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King.

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

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

I had been involved in the March on Washington in 1963. I was with friends carrying a sign, 'Protestants, Jews and Catholics for Civil Rights.'