When I was growing up in Alabama in the '50s, even though we were poor and the laws were against blacks, we still had a sense of morality.

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

Don't let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

It wasn't a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

They shoot the white girl first.

What's fair ain't necessarily right

I think it is time for a modern War Against Error. A deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies. A wider war that is fought daily by human rights organizations in journals, reports, indexes, dangerous visits, and encounters with malign oppressive forces. A hugely funded and intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the dispossessed.

You born here? Naw. Down south. Jacksonville, Florida. Bad country, boy. Bad, bad country. You know they ain't even got an orphanage in Jacksonville where colored babies can go? They have to put 'em in jail. I tell people that talk about them sit ins I was raised in jail, and it don't scare me none.

Unaligned, nobly interventionist, unbrooked by nations and political parties, private interests or public exhaustion, Amnesty International declares states, walls, borders irrelevant to its humanitarian goals, detrimental to its tasks, by summoning responsibility and refusing to accept a myopic government's own narrative of its behavior.