Rand Paul Quotes

Frederick Douglass had charged the air with rebellion and redemption, and these in turn had supported him in the heat of abolitionism. But the atmosphere changed to one of repression after the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

I'm old enough to have lived through a time when Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and others died so people of color could vote.

In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.

Slavery will not be overthrown without excitement, a most tremendous excitement.

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.

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.

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

Her continuity - you know, if you connect Harriet Tubman, who died in 1913, to Rosa Parks, born in 1913, you get this extraordinary spectrum of the African-American experience.

There never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians—Englishmen and Americans—created one.

After the Civil war, everybody in retrospect claimed to be an abolitionist. It’s amazing that slavery survived so long when there were so many abolitionists.

[The Underground Railroad] demonstrated to northerners, white northerners, who were not committed to the end of slavery, how horrendous an institution slavery was. How much black people desired freedom. What they would do, the extent they would do to gain that freedom. This against the slave holders' propaganda that slavery was a benevolent institution and that black people were happy as slaves.

The Underground Railroad, which was the first integrated civil rights movement, is a part of our history that not a lot of us know about. And it's actually a very empowering side of our history.

Every red stripe in that flag represents the black man's blood that has been shed.

Witness, eternal God! Oh, witness that, from this hour, I will do what one man can to drive out this curse of slavery from my land!

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.

The slave power dares anything, and it can be conquered only by the united masses of the people. From Congress to the people, I appeal.

If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.

I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.

This will be a great day in our history; the date of a New Revolution - quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind which will come soon!

There were three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, and Rosa Parks had missed the first one. Parks, whose act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, moved to Detroit two years later for safety reasons.

In 1999, I was in St. Louis with Martin Luther King III as we led protests against the state's failure to hire minority contractors for highway construction projects. We went at dawn on a summer day with over a thousand people and performed acts of civil disobedience.

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.

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

African American history is really American history because African Americans really helped build this country.

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.