About the Congress of Racial Equality

Founded in 1942, CORE is the third oldest and one of the "Big Four"civil rights groups in the United States.From the protestsagainst "Jim Crow" laws of the 40's through the "Sit-ins" of the50's, the "Freedom Rides" of the 60's, the cries for "Self-Determination" in the 70's, "Equal Opportunity" in the 80's, community development in the 90's, to the current demand for equal access to information, CORE has championed true equality.

Marriage Q & A with Niger Innis

Q. Is the effort to redefine marriage the same as African-Americans’ pursuit of civil rights 40 years ago, a claim often made by radical activists?

A. “Absolutely, positively not,” says Congress of Racial Equality national spokesman Niger Innis. “To compare [a] desire…to a race of people…whose freedoms were curtailed because of their race, because of their ethnicity, is outrageous. It’s offensive, and it is illogical!”

To Niger Innis, the distinction between blacks’ pursuit of civil rights and radical activists’ seeking to destroy marriage lies in the fact that the former was rooted in reality, the latter merely in rhetoric.

"The civil rights movement came into [being] because of hundreds and hundreds of years of a class of people being identified as subhuman. The reason we had to pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution was to deal with that hundreds of years’ reality. [P]eople who happened to have a particular sexual preference were not discriminated [against] to that degree.

Innis says that freedom for one group of people should not infringe on those of another group.  

“Blacks did not say, ‘We want a redefinition of what is means to be white!’ Blacks did not say, ‘I will only have my full civil rights once an Italian American can no longer call himself an Italian American, when Jews can no longer celebrate Passover, when Irish can no longer have St. Patrick’s Day.’ That’s not what the civil rights movement was about. And…to the extent that the civil rights movement has been hijacked and radicalized to not be about the freedom for one group, but to be about the curtailing of freedom for another group, that ‘civil rights’ movement is wrong!

Furthemore:

"That’s what the radical [activists’] movement is about today. It’s not just a question anymore of them being discriminated against because…they have a particular sexual practice. What they are talking about is taking the institution of marriage and throwing it out completely, and redefining it anew. It’s radically changing it.

Bishop Robert C. Morlino to Receive Prestigious Civil Rights Award

Alliance for Marriage and the Congress of Racial Equality to Honor Bishop Morlino for His Courage in Defense of Marriage