On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Its enactment, following the longest continuous debate in the history of the U.S. Senate, enshrined into law the basic principle upon which our country was founded - that all pe...
Evan Wolfson is a dear friend of mine. Almost more than any other, Evan is responsible for bringing the issue of marriage equality to the forefront of our struggle for civil rights. He is a courageous pioneer who has been relentless in this battle fo...
When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn't immense work put in, and as if there wasn't immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; t...
I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usuall...
I was proud to march beside some of the most notable Civil Rights activists, such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., from Selma to Montgomery.
It is an honor to be awarded with such a high rating from an organization as well respected as the NAACP. I am pleased that the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the nation, has recognized my voting record.
When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.
I'd like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general - criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don't just want to give speeches; I'd like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way.
The first thing I said to myself on 9/11 was, 'There go our civil rights.' I found out by comparing notes later that George Carlin and I both said that at the exact same time. That's the first thing that popped into our head.
I am a Minnesotan, and not just because I root for the Vikings and the Twins. I like the Minnesota-nice sensibility. I like the liberal tradition; I like the Hubert Humphrey tradition fighting for civil rights.
Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents' then-illegal and interracial m...
If you look at attitudes today and where they are headed, it's clear to me that supporting equal rights, including the rights to civil marriage, is a net positive for winning elections, as well as the right thing to do.
If the events of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it's that the terrorists can attack us, but they can't take away what makes us American - our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that.
Young people have this almost romantic attachment to civil rights, liberties, emancipating people from oppression, etc. The idea that such oppression exists in this country offends me, but it's able to be pushed and sold because education in this cou...
When I was at 'Newsweek' magazine - which, you know, this really sounds like I walked four miles in the snow to school - but I started at 'Newsweek' magazine in 1963, which was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So it was actually legal to discrimi...
When I was 15 years old and in the tenth grade, I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at t...
In the women's movement, women needed men to stand up and say, 'This isn't right.' In the civil rights of the '60s, it took people of all color to demand equal rights.
In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.
Acknowledging that a woman's right to be safe from a gender-based attack was a "civil right," I believed, was critically important in changing the American consciousness. When a right reaches the status and categorization of a "civil right," it means...
The negative penalties of the Old Testament case laws were not harsh but just, not a threat to society but rather the necessary judicial foundation of civic freedom… the Old Testament was harsh on criminals because it was soft on victims.
It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food, didn't have jobs, didn't have health care, didn'...
