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:
“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)
“When civil fury first grew high,
And men fell out, they knew not why;
When hard words, jealousies, and fears,
Set folks together by the ears,
And made them fight, like mad or drunk,
For Dame Religion, as for punk;”
—Samuel Butler (1612–1680)
“Democracy and Republicanism in their best partisan utterances alike declare for human rights. Jefferson, the father of Democracy, Lincoln, the embodiment of Republicanism, and the Divine author of the religion on which true civilization rests, all proclaim the equal rights of all men.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
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—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)