A. Philip Randolph Quotes

Your honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form of our present government; that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in the change of both but by perfectly peaceable and orderly means....

The American people are not inclined to change their society in order to free the Negro. They are ready to undertake some, and perhaps major reforms, but not to make a revolution.

The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. No thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.

Where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the Northern States it was merely superficial and easily corrected. In the Southern, it is incorporated with the whole system and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process. That it may finally be effected and its progress hastened, will be my last and fondest prayer.

A people may be unprepared for good institutions; but to kindle a desire for them is a necessary part of the preparation.

The South opposes the civil rights of Negroes and their protection by law. Witness lynchings where no one is punished, witness the Jim Crow laws that deny the letter and spirit of the Constitution. For democracy to have real meaning, the Negro must have the same civil rights as any other American citizen. It seems obvious that the South does not yet know what this war is all about

When I grow up I’m going to change the government.

A very great percentage of our people see only from $200 to $600 cash in hand during the course of a year, and many, many others have incomes under $1000 or ranging from $1000 to $2000 a year. This problem involves so many people that we cannot just say "Let the government solve it." We, as a people, must solve it by deciding on the type of social and economic philosophy which we wish to see established in this country. When we know what changes we want, we can then set government machinery to work to accomplish them, but the people themselves must know what it is they wish to do.

The New Deal ultimately undermined Jim Crow’s prospects. The very legislation embraced by Southern segregationists created at first mere chinks, then whole openings for social change that were grasped by an incipient, soon powerful, movement for equal rights for Blacks.

We do need great change in Burma. We are trying to build a new society, a society where basic human rights are respected, and where our people enjoy all the benefits of democratic institutions.

Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

I noticed that democracy was broken and tried to work on fixing that in Japan. Then I realized that it was broken all over the place and decided to work on that too.

We're a nation of laws, but the good thing about America, is that laws reside in the people and people can change the laws.

The courts may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.

How many of you are willing to go to jail for freedom?

I'm looking to be shot any time I step out of my car ... If I die, it will be in a good cause. I've been fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Vietnam.

My goal for the Arab world is to change the status quo, which is horrible politically, religiously, economically, in every way.

Men may die, but the fabric of free institutions remain unshaken.

Everything that we are about as African people in terms of our struggle for justice and freedom started in the church. There is no separation of the sacred and secular—of the church and state—in Black America. There is no separation.

Institutions-government, churches, industries, and the like-have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.

If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It

If you have an election no mater how free, if you do not have a government that respects people’s rights, you don’t have a democracy.

Once the clutch of Jim Crow had loosened, opponents of civil rights shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda …. Fusing anxiety about crime to anxiety over racial change and riots, civil rights and racial disorder—initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement—were defined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.

The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of man change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.

Believe in: the inalienable right of self-preservation of the people against the exercise of arbitrary and unlicensed power, the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights, the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, maintaining the constitutional rights of the South, favoring of a white man's government, opposing Negro equality both social and political. May not be: a Republican, a Union Army veteran, or a member of the Loyal League