Everywhere we look, we find irrefutable evidence that the Negroes in America have yet to be given full citizenship, and we find increasing evidence, too, that they are no longer willing to tolerate the burdens we have imposed on them.
Negroes must be as free as other Americans —free to vote and to learn and to earn their way, and to share in the decisions of government would shape their lives. We know that to accomplish this end will mean great tension and difficulty and strife for all of u
Those of us who are white can only dimly guess at what the pain of racial discrimination must be—what it must be like to be turned away from a public place, or made to use only a segregated portion of that place,
The problem between the white and colored people is a problem for all sections of the United States. And as I have said, I believe there has been a great deal of hypocrisy in dealing with it.
We are today in the midst of a great debate, whether or not this nation, the champion of freedom throughout the world, can now extend full freedom to twenty million of our own citizens who have yet to achieve it. Passage of the Civil Rights Act is not an end to the debate. It only…
For an American man, woman, or child to be turned away from a public place for no reason other than the color of his skin is an intolerable insult, an insult that is in no way eased by the bland explanation that it has been allowed to go on for a hundred years or more.…
I have been drawn to the Civil War, as have many Americans, because it was a climactic time in our history; a time of incredible courage and bravery; a time when the American people faced a strange and bitter crisis and emerged united and resolved to continue the historic struggle of free men to achieve…
The data coming to light now shows that we have done all too little to rehabilitate and reintegrate into society those who have once run afoul of the law enforcement
The more closely one looks at the cost and deployment of our crime prevention efforts, the more apparent it becomes that we have put too much responsibility at the end of the line, rather than at the beginning. Enforcement and correction can only do part of the job.
It is still true that a non-white mother is four times as likely to die in childbirth as a white mother. There are 2.6 deaths per 10,000 live white births. The figure for nonwhites is 10.2 deaths.
In the past five years the winds of change have blown as fiercely in the United States as anywhere in the world, and they will not—they cannot—abate.
I come here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued
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