Quotes about Equality

That's Black Power in a real sense. We have achieved some very significant gains and victories as a result of this program, because the black man collectively now has enough buying power to make the difference between profit and loss in any major industry or concern of our country. Withdrawing economic support from those who will not be just and fair in their dealings is a very potent weapon.

Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strange them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.

What we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our economic support from the bus company.

All of this tells us that the white backlash is nothing new. White America has been backlashing on the fundamental God-given and human rights of Negro Americans for more than three hundred years. With all of her dazzling achievements and stupendous material strides, America has maintained its strange ambivalence on the question of racial justice.

The hard truth is that neither Negro nor white has yet done enough to expect the dawn of a new day. While much has been done, it has been accomplished by too few and on a scale too limited for the breadth of the goal. Freedom is not won by a passive acceptance of suffering. Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering. By this measure, Negroes have not yet paid the full price for freedom. And whites have not yet faced the full cost of justice.

I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. When oppressed people willingly accept their oppression they only serve to give the oppressor a convenient justification for his acts.

My parents would always tell me that I should not hate the white man, but that it was my duty as a Christian to love him. The question arose in my mind: How could I love a race of people who hated me and who had been responsible for breaking me up with one of my best childhood friends? This was a great question in my mind for a number of years.

Ever since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, America has manifested a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves - a self in which she has proudly professed democracy and a self in which she has sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy. The reality of slavery, has always had to confront the ideals of democracy and Christinanity.

It is disappointment with the Christian church that appears to be more white than Christian, and with many white clergymen who prefer to remain silent behind the security of stained-glass windows.

What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?

But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood.