Selma Quotes

“You cannot be afraid to speak up and speak out for what you believe. You have to have courage, raw courage.”
― John Lewis

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”
― Barack Obama

“I can never do justice to the great feeling of amazement and encouragement I felt when, perhaps for the first time in American history, white citizens of a Southern state banded together to come to Selma and show their indignation about the injustices against the African-Americans.”
― Amelia Boynton Robinson

“We've always lived in the past in Selma, and we still do. But the past has changed on us. It included a lot of stories it didn't used to.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“At Selma's small visitors' center, an elderly white man took out a street map and carefully marked a half-dozen historic sites: antebellum mansions, remnants of the 1865 battle, the Pettus Bridge, the Martin Luther King Historic Walking Tour, and the Voting Rights Museum. "We've always lived in the past in Selma, and we still do," he said. "But the past has changed on us. It includes a lot of stories it didn't used to.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“I asked [Selma mayor Joe] Smitherman about his own attitude toward the Confederacy. He responded by telling me about his childhood in the Depression, as the son of sharecroppers. "We were dirt poor," he said. "My father died when I was a few months old and my mother raised the six of us on welfare. For us, the Civil War was pride. It was all we had to hold onto. The rich whites, they had ancestors who were colonel this or general that. But we didn't know anything about that. It was just pride in having once been something.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War