Arlen Specter Quotes

The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.

Desegregation is a joke.

Essentially, Eisenhower passed on to his successors the problem of guaranteeing constitutional rights to Negro citizens.

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

In the Brown decision, the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck down the legal and moral footing of racially segregated public education in this country.

We could beat back Kennedy on Civil Rights, but Lyndon [Johnson] knows how to beat us.

If the gentlemen from the South really want to take such action, let them propose a constitutional amendment that will deny to the colored people of the country equality of rights under the Constitution, and see how far they will get with the American people.

Was it the intention of the framers ... to forbid the states to enact and enforce segregation statutes? If one goes to the historical materials with this specific question, the only answer is in the negative. The framers did not intend or expect then and there to outlaw segregation, which, of course, was a practice widely prevalent in the North.

Most voters—most Republicans—are too young to imagine a world before integration and have no longing to see one.

School desegregation cases overturned not only the constitutional precedents built up over three quarters of a century but the social structure of an entire region ... Desegregation decrees have all the qualities of social legislation ...

Integration would lead to miscegenation, which will destroy our white race eventually.

White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.

Its whole effect is not to confer or regulate rights, but to require that whatever of these enumerated rights and obligations are imposed by State laws shall ... be without distinction based on race.

The United States Office of Education has likewise been guilty of spreading racial equality propaganda. In a report to the press, Dr. John W. Studebaker, head of the Office of Education, and his Negro assistant, Dr. Ambrose Caliver, who is racial adviser in the office of Education, called upon the colleges and universities of the South to open their doors to Negro students

The more conservative element of Negroes differ from those who hold the most radical views in opposition to segregation only in terms of time and technique of its elimination …. all Negroes must condemn any form of segregation based on race, creed or color anywhere in our nation

THERE Is no power in the world--not even in all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis—which could now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation

I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at the point of a bayonet, if necessary.

Plessy v. Ferguson was a perversion of the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

I think we ought to leave the law exactly the way it is, the 14th amendment.

As the civil rights struggle progressed, Americans responded to the justice of the cause, shedding layers of the crusty armor that shielded the white majority from contact with its large black minority. There are layers left. It feels so much better to be on good terms with one another.

The demands of the Civil Rights era weren't limited to voting rights - they strove for an end to segregation in all aspects of life, including housing, employment, and public accommodations.

The civil rights movement didn't end on August 6, 1965. It continued because the work of creating a truly equal country never ends.

You can't put civil rights on the ballot.

Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.

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.