Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.
None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots.
In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.
Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals. Listen to others, but do not become a blind follower.
What is the quality of your intent?
Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.
I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.
This is a great country, but fortunately for you, it is not perfect. There is much to be done to bring about complete equality. Remove hunger. Bring reality closer to theory and democratic principles.
Today's Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.
If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.
Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
Mere access to the courthouse doors does not by itself assure a proper functioning of the adversary process.
A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi... has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.
We deal here with the right of all of our children, whatever their race, to an equal start in life and to an equal opportunity to reach their full potential as citizens. Those children who have been denied that right in the past deserve better than to see fences thrown up to deny them that right in the future.
'Black' is an adjective, in my book, and the way I use it, sometimes I'll say 'black people.' But if I'm talking about a person, I'm going to say 'a Negro,' because I was taught to say that, and I don't see any reason to change it. I don't think that gives pride or anything else. I don't think you get pride by calling yourself this or that.
Deciding not to decide is, of course, among the most important things done by the Supreme Court. It takes a lot of doing, but it can be done.
Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.
My father had a flat rule. He believed that every man's house was his castle. He had a flat rule: no man could come in his house without his permission.
We could get more action in the South because the Negroes had a feeling that they were being oppressed. But you take New York, for example: they'd give Negroes little five-cent jobs here and there - and they thought they had something. And the same in Chicago and any of the metropolitan areas.
It was taken for granted that we had to make something of ourselves. Not much was said about it; it was just in the atmosphere of the home.
