American - Celebrity | June 25, 1933 -
I've always found the rhetoric of mainstream civil rights leaders and organizations to be far too timid, accommodationist, and gradualist. It always seemed to me that they behaved like meek and gentle supplicants begging the oppressor for a few crumbs of justice, for a few molecules of citizenship rights.
James Meredith
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My great-grandfather was the last ruler of the Choctaw Nation, and from birth, I was taught that my role was to restore the power and the glory to my bloodline.
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The real problem in Mississippi is almost a complete moral breakdown. In order to move Mississippi from the bottom to the top, all we have to do is just get people to do a little more what they know, to practice a little more of what they preach.
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My statue at Ole Miss is a false idol. And it wasn't put there for my benefit. It was put there for Ole Miss and Mississippi.
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It is an insult for me to have been alive through the times you are calling the so-called civil rights movement. I don't celebrate my humiliations and my insults.
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Have you ever heard of Irish, Poles, Germans, Italians and Jews being integrated? They go anywhere and just enjoy their rights. Why call it integration when black folks do the same thing? It's a con job.
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Only the family of God can solve the problems of our time.
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My answer to the racial problem in America is to not deal with it at all. The founding fathers dealt with it when they made the Constitution.
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I considered myself engaged in a war from Day One. And my objective was to force the federal government - the Kennedy administration at that time - into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen.
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My momma was slick as greased lightning. She knew how to get anybody and everybody to do whatever she wanted 'em to do.
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Nothing has been more detrimental to me than to be considered a symbol, because I never stood for any of that... The civil rights movement thought they would do me harm over the years by disassociating themselves from me. Well, nothing in the world was more to my advantage. I was never one of them... I had my own divine mission.
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I had developed a specifically calculated plan to break the system of white supremacy. My theory was that since Mississippi was the place, this was the ultimate: Mississippi was the place you had to break it.
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