Civil Rights Quotes
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Look at what I've done my entire life. I have been working on behalf of civil rights, women's rights, human rights for years and I know how challenging it is to change our political system and I have the highest regard for those who have put themselves on the line.
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Yet civil rights issues are very much on the front burner in South Carolina between the Black Lives Matter movement and police shootings.
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Do you know what it took for Balanchine to put me, a black man, on stage with a white woman? This was 1957, before civil rights. He showed me how to take her [holding her delicately by the wrist]. He said, ‘put your hand on top.’ The skin colors were part of the choreography. He saw what was going to happen in the world and put it on stage.
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Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered as our prince of peace, of civil rights. We owe him something major that will keep his memory alive.
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Two years ago, the Supreme Court handed down an 8–1 decision that found the 1875 Civil Rights unconstitutional.
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I believe that what I've worked for - women and children, civil rights against poverty, trying to level the playing field for people to have a better chance - is what I still believe is important and what I'm trying to do today.
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On human rights, civil rights and environmental quality, I consider myself to be very liberal. On the management of government, on openness of government, on strengthening individual liberties and local levels of government, I consider myself a conservative. And I don't see that the two attitudes are incompatible.
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The great paradox of the civil rights revolution is that instead of enforcing and expanding equality before the law, the revolution created differential rights based on race, gender and, any day now, sexual orientation. The great liberal revolution, centuries in the making, that brought forth equality in law has been overthrown. In its place we see rising a new feudal legal order of status-based rights.
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I think it's really crucial to leave our American context, not only for a sense of individual freedom, but also to make links to international struggles for civil rights.
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O.J. Simpson was primarily interested in O.J. His rise to fame in the late '60s coincided with the period where black athletes were more outspoken and political than in any era. You're talking about the generation of black athletes that came about after Jackie Robinson. Athletes after that were just happy to find a place in sports. But when you got to the mid-'60s, you had athletes like Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali, who were very outspoken on the issues of race and civil rights.
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I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.
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I'd like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general - criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don't just want to give speeches; I'd like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way.
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I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.
