Silence is for fools. Communication is for leaders. Justice is for those brave enough to not stand another moment dealing with people that feel the solution to any problem is through cold indifference because of...

But courage was growing in me too. Little by little it was getting harder and harder for me not to speak out.

The amazing aftermath of Birmingham, the sweeping Negro Revolution, revealed to people all over the land that there are no outsiders in all these fifty states of America. When a police dog buried his fangs...

A freedom given up is not so easily regained.

She wore heavy sandals, with socks. No kid in the entire state of Mississippi wore black socks in the summer. Shoot, if I wasn’t standing smack-dab in the middle of the library, I wouldn’t be...

The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything.

Violence never really deals with the basic evil of the situation. Violence may murder the murderer, but it doesn’t murder murder. Violence may murder the liar, but it doesn’t murder lie; it doesn’t establish truth....

The rhetoric of ‘law and order’ was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years...

For the rest of the afternoon, Miss Bloom smiled almost as bright as the big yellow sun shining through the front picture window. Her library was filled up with people who loved books.

The words ‘bad timing’ came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning…they did not realize that it was ridiculous...

We can’t answer King’s assassination with violence. That would be the worst tribute we could pay him.

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my ‘race,’ unless I was permitted to put ‘human.’ The form had to be completed under...

Sit on the truth too long and you mash the life right out of it.

And all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that is the yearning of men for a flag: for a unity that cannot be compromised,...

I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn’t know that black people could write books. I didn’t know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my...

I loved going to the library. It was the first time I ever saw Black newspapers and magazines like JET, Ebony, the Baltimore Afro-American, or the Chicago Defender. And I’ll never forget my librarian.

The greatest evil in our country today is…ignorance…We need to be taught to study rather than to believe.

Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery’s full grip on U.S. Society – its intimate connections to present day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in...

The enemy was not the Klan but the inside-outside lock that racism and classism had on the minds of the people: It operated from the inside through self-hate and self-doubt, and from the outside through...

The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has...

In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been...

[O]ur revolt was as much against the traditional black leadership structure as it was against segregation and discrimination.

When one person got involved, it took everybody else along. I went to jail first, but my entire family soon joined the Movement. One time, Faith & I ended up at home w all the...

We knew no one man had killed the prophet. Rather, the combined weight of racism and an absence of moral courage had crushed him. A constitution ignored, laws denied, these were the weapons. America pulled...

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was a manifestation of hope that humanity might one day get out of its own way by finding the courage to realize that love and nonviolence are not indicators...

The children of Birmingham did not really die in the State of Alabama, however, because Alabama is a state of mind, and in the minds of the [white] men who rule Alabama, those children had...

Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.

Senator John Stennis:The civil rights movement did more to free the white man that the black man. … It freed my soul.

I guess it’s the curse of our generation, having to put aside our lives to do the right thing.

We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but...

People believe what they want to believe. Even if it isn’t true.