Al Sharpton Quotes

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.

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.

Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, North Carolina.

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

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.

Martin Luther King Jr., recognized bias when he saw it, knew what he was talking about.

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.

I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins - I was only 16 years old - we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library.

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

I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes.

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

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.

I'd like to think I would have signed the Civil Rights bill and wouldn't have had any issues with it.

In fifth grade, we did 10 minutes on slavery and 40 minutes on Abraham Lincoln, and in 10th grade you might do 10 minutes on the civil rights era and 40 minutes on Martin Luther King, and that's it.

My black hero is and always will be Martin Luther King, not just because of the strength of his oratory but because his vision was very much the reality that I'd come to take for granted.

I never knew about racial segregation until Martin Luther King.

I was very much a part of the civil rights era, so, of course, my fantasy was to marry some outstanding black gentleman, a leader - someone like Martin Luther King who was doing something for black people.

Growing up in Mississippi - a state that historically was a place of racial injustice, inequality and oppression - gave me the unique opportunity to experience first-hand the evolution of the civil rights movement through the eyes of my parents, grandparents, and the black elders of our community.

I want to play Martin Luther King. That is absolutely a role and a character who is important to the landscape of the world that I really want to play.

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.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture 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.

The separate water foundations, park benches, bathrooms and restaurants of the Jim Crow South startled me. These experiences motivated my lifelong study of the status of African Americans and the sources of improvement in that status.

I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.