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"I think the Civil Rights Movement changed that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961."
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"The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved."
"When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement."
"If Willie Nelson had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country, because he refuses to leave the back of the bus."
"Civil rights are more important today than they ever have been in our country. There is so much divisiveness today."
"There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites."
"Rarely in my 45 years as a civil rights lawyer have I been so angry about an injustice as I am about what happened to Billy Ray Johnson."
"I don't call myself a white supremacist. I'm a civil rights activist concerned about European-American rights."
"There are severe limitations on civil rights. In the international arena, Iran is turning into an isolated country, and the international community is becoming more hostile toward it."
"The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody."
Explore more quotes by Bernice Johnson Reagon
"Personally I discovered that you could go through the academy as a young scholar, come out, and almost immediately have an impact on the academic environment."
"The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life."
"The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American."
"I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience."
"I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song."
"I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life."
"I started graduate school in 1971, I started working at the Smithsonian in the festival in 1972. I went full-time at the Smithsonian in 1974. And I got my doctorate in 1975."
"Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are."
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