It was of limited usefulness to head great rallies. The government did not listen, and, soon enough, the tear gas and the muzzles of the guns were turned against the people. The justice of our cries went unrecognized.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In order to rally people, governments need enemies... if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.
I understand the protests, but not the shooting and the attempts to bring down the state. We cannot allow hatred to control our lives. We must remain unified to defeat this evil.
The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.
The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.
It was the biggest suppression of voting rights in our country's history since Jim Crow. And the thread of race runs from the beginning to the end of my book.
For in the first place the American people could not have been swept too fast and too far in this movement without enough alarms being sounded to be heard and heeded.
Citizens United fought to defend our right to free speech - and won a great victory in the United States Supreme Court.
But on second thought, after I decreed the state of emergency, I came to the conclusion that that was impossible to achieve without bloodshed because the street protesters were full of anger and nearly out of control. This is why I thought we needed to find another way out.
A few days after Bloody Sunday, there was demonstration in more than 80 American cities. People were demanding that the government act.
We didn't start out to make a protest record at all. That would have been too shallow. As usual, it was simply a case of absorbing what's going on around us.