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After Civil Rights, it was very awkward for whites and blacks. We didn't know how to talk to each other.

I never ceased to be surprised when southern whites, at their homes or clubs, told racial jokes and spoke so derogatorily of blacks while longtime servants, for whom they quite clearly had some affection, were well within earshot.

When you live in the South, you're constantly part of the civil rights movement.

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.

By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.

I grew up in the Deep South, where sexism, racism, and homophobia were and still are alive and well. I have early, early memories of words and actions of this type being very painful.

In the time when my mother began standing up against prejudice and racism, the vast majority of white Americans rarely thought about civil rights.

I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights.

Well, I've been politically involved for a really long time. Growing up in the segregated South, it was a very painful experience for me to live through the open racism of the time.

You know, growing up, I lived in a neighborhood in Long Island where there was basically one black family. And I remember hearing all the parents and the kids in the neighborhood say racist things about this family.