Civil Rights Movement
Wurf was extremely active in the American civil rights movement. He helped establish the first New York state chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the late 1940s. He was a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was attending a strike of public employees when he was assassinated in 1968. "Let us never forget that Martin Luther King, on a mission for us, was killed in this city. He helped bring us this victory," Wurf later said. Although Wurf did not back the strike initially, he supported it after it went into effect.
Read more about this topic: Jerome Wurf
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil, rights and/or movement:
“I’ve never been afraid to step out and to reach out and to move out in order to make things happen.”
—Victoria Gray, African American civil rights activist. As quoted in This Little Light of Mine, ch. 3, by Hay Mills (1993)
“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)
“We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
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—Ashley Montagu (b. 1905)