Civil Rights
After Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, plans for an interracial celebration in still-segregated Atlanta were not initially well supported by the city's business elite until Coca-Cola intervened.
J. Paul Austin, the chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola, and Mayor Ivan Allen summoned key Atlanta business leaders to the Commerce Club's eighteenth floor dining room, where Austin told them flatly, 'It is embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner. We are an international business. The Coca-Cola Co. does not need Atlanta. You all need to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Co.' Within two hours of the end of that meeting, every ticket to the dinner was sold. —Andrew YoungHowever, Coca-Cola has also faced allegations of racial discrimination in its employment practices, and faced a class-action racial discrimination lawsuit regarding this in the early 2000s.
Read more about this topic: The Coca-Cola Company
Famous quotes by civil rights:
“Children’s liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (b. 1939)
“... as a result of generations of betrayal, it’s nearly impossible for Southern Negroes to trust a Southern white. No matter what he does or what he suffers, a white liberal is never established beyond suspicion in the hearts of the minority.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 2, ch. 10 (1962)
“There are those who say to you—we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)