Civil Rights Work
Watts worked to desegregate public facilities and institutions during the 1940s and 1950s. He worked with Thurgood Marshall on the Ada Lois Sipuel challenge to segregation in the law school of Oklahoma University; consequently, the Supreme Court ruled in 1948, in Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla., that barring Sipuel from the school was unconstitutional. In the late 1950s, Watts and Oklahoma State Senator Gene Stipe entered a restaurant. When a waitress stopped them at the door and told them that the restaurant " not serve Negroes," Watts replied, "I don't eat Negroes. I just came to get some ham and eggs." He also worked to desegregate local institutions and, together with his brother, Buddy, ensured that his nephew, J.C. Watts, was one of the first black children to attend the newly integrated elementary school in their community. He rose to become the head of the NAACP in Oklahoma, and became friends with national leaders of the civil rights movement like Martin Luther King.
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Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil, rights and/or work:
“What I fear is being in the presence of evil and doing nothing. I fear that more than death.”
—Otilia De Koster, Panamanian civil rights monitor. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 15 (December 19, 1988)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“...at this stage in the advancement of women the best policy for them is not to talk much about the abstract principles of women’s rights but to do good work in any job they get, better work if possible than their male colleagues.”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)
“Whate’er we leave to God, God does,
And blesses us;
The work we choose should be our own,
God leaves alone.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)