1
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 only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.Timothy B. Tyson
2
Senator John Stennis:The civil rights movement did more to free the white man that the black man.... It freed my soul.Joe Biden
3
The greatest evil in our country today is...ignorance... We need to be taught to study rather than to believe.Septima Poinsette Clark
4
We can’t answer King’s assassination with violence. That would be the worst tribute we could pay him.Sammy Davis Jr.
5
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, that cannot be bought; that is conscious of itself, of its strength, that is militant.Ralph Ellison
6
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 time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.Douglas A. Blackmon
7
Sit on the truth too long and you mash the life right out of it.Margaret McMullan
8
The time is always right to do the right thing.Unknown
9
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 wearing shoes.Augusta Scattergood
10
I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything.Augusta Scattergood