James A. Garfield Quotes

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued 90 years ago. I believe in gradualism. But 90 years is gradual enough.

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

The American civil rights movement is not, and never has been dominated by the Communists—because the overwhelming majority of civil rights leaders in this country, both Negro and white, have recognized and rejected Communism as a menace to the freedom of all.

The rights, privileges and responsibilities of full American citizenship. This is all that the Negro asks. He will not willingly accept less. As long as America offers less, she will be that much less a democracy. The whole way is the American way

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

One hundred and fifty years after Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, equality for many Americans remains elusive.

Black people have been fighting for basic citizenship rights since the inception of the country.

It's good that segregation is over.

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.

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.

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.

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.

In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.

Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

Civil rights was not an impossible dream. Thousands of brave African Americans stepped forward to make it happen.

In the summer of 1964, my sister and I went to South Ballston, Virginia, to stay with my aunt and her kids. They passed the civil rights bill that summer; my cousins were so happy because now they could swim in the pool.

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

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Civil Rights Act.

The March on Washington affirmed our values as a people: equality and opportunity for all. Forty-one years ago, during a time of segregation, these were an ideal.

It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.

From slavery to segregation, we remember that America did not always live up to its ideals. In fact, we often fell far short of them. But we also learned that fundamental to our national character is the drive to live out the true meaning of our creed.

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

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.