Mavis Staples Quotes

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 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.

I used to say, 'We've always had integration in the South... we just want it now in the daytime.

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.

The time to end racial segregation in the South is upon us now.

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

When you live in the South, you're constantly part of the civil rights movement.

Southern change gonna come at last! Now your crosses are burning fast, Southern Man.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.

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.

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

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

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

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

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

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

The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.

Harry Truman knows I am against him on this [civil rights] program. I just don’t think Congress should try to cram his program down the throats of Southern states.

By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back in the image of God and democracy.

White southerners used anti communism to beat back the challenges to the status quo on race.

Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson understood that the South would continue to be an outcast unless it abandoned folkways that were injurious—to whites as well as blacks—and they employed the powers of the state to coerce recalcitrants into new patterns of behavior.