civil-rights

The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay.

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: 'We don't serve colored people here.' "I said: 'that's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.

Initially, the purveyors of racism need no more than the silent acquiescence of the public ... [I]t is never too soon to confront bigotry and racism whenever, wherever, and in whatever form it raises its ugly head. It is incumbent upon all people to confront even the slightest hint of racist thought or action with zero tolerance.

Segregation in the American South was bankrolled by the wealthy eugenicist from the Northeast, Wickliffe Draper.

Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon.

Bigotry is based on deception, of oneself and of others.

You're not under attack when others gain rights and privileges you've always had.

It's illegal to deny people their records due to race or gender. Adoptees deserve the same rights and protections.

People often call fighting racism being 'PC' when they don't want to confront their own prejudice

Never be content to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon. Your rights could be next.

What if racism is so perfect, it made you believe the boycotting and peaceful protests of the civil rights movement actually changed policies, but in actuality policies were gonna change anyway."Hell, let them sit whereever they want on the bus. Just don't sit with them. Let them into our schools, the teachers will still teach from a eurocentric curriculum anyway. Let them eat with us, they'll need the energy and strength to build our homes."Racism is a perfect system with an impenetrable barrier.

The minute we look away, the minute we stop fighting back, that's the minute bigotry wins.

Tolerance of intolerance enables oppression.

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

Standing against discrimination for some while supporting discrimination against others hurts us all.

It speaks volumes when people who are discriminated against go on to discriminate against others.

Reducing a group to a slur or stereotype reduces us all.

We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.