John Lewis Quotes

It's not just Barack Obama, but I doubt Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton would have made it to the White House without Selma.

Selma was the turning point.

Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.

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

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

The March on Washington was not a climax but a new beginning.

King would certainly be overjoyed by Barack Obama's inauguration, but we must avoid, and indeed reject, any careless claims that Obama's swearing in marks the fulfillment of King's dream.

President [Barack] Obama is a man who had certain advantages because of the civil rights movement.

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

With 'Selma,' I grew up in Alabama, 45 minutes away from Selma. I have gone to that commemorative march many times with my parents.

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.

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.

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

The first African-American leader was Dr. Martin Luther King.

I was a child when the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King occurred, and I wanted to hear what was going on. I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to contribute in the best way I possibly could.

If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.

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.

What gets lost is that the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.

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

Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama's election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge - which in 2013 was declared a National Historic Landmark - isn't symbolic of the Civil War in a meaningful way. It is, however, the modern-day battlefield where the voting rights movement was born.

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.

The March on Washington was a middle class picnic.