We are pregnant with freedom.
I must confess that waltzes do not move me, I guess I hummed the blues too early, and spent too many midnights out wailing to the rain.
Being a warrior and being a struggler has been forced on me by oppression, otherwise I would have been free to be so much more.
Unless you are addressing the issues people are concerned about and contributing positive direction, they’ll never support you. The first thing the enemy tries to do is isolate revolutionaries from the masses of people, making us horrible and hideous monsters so that our people will hate us.
A woman’s place is in the struggle.
The U. S. is becoming more hostile to Black people and other people of color. Racism is running rampant and xenophobia is on the rise.
I couldn’t see how we could seriously struggle without having a strong sense of collectivity, without being responsible FOR each other and TO each other.
In the long run, the people are our only appeal. The only ones who can free us are ourselves.
And it is that one percent, the heads of large corporations, who control the policies of news media and determine what you and I hear on radio, read in the newspapers, see on television. It is more important for us to think about where the media gets its information.
People think that in order for something to work, it has to be complicated, but a lot of times the opposite is true. We usually reach success by putting the simple truths that we know into practice.
I have advocated and I still advocate revolutionary change.
It never occurred to me that anyone would name a nuclear missile “Peacekeeper”. It never occurred to me that thousands of people would be killed in the name of “peace-keeping”.
My fantasy of Cuba was that everybody was going to be going around looking like Fidel, with green uniforms – and it was very different from my vision of how Cuba was going to be.
I think that people who want to change this planet have to seriously understand that as human beings we have to work to be good.
The death penalty is used in such a blatantly racist way in the United States. There is no way that can be defended under any kind of definition of justice by anybody.
I think that any time anybody gets rid of oppression, intervention, exploitation, cruelty – that’s positive.
There’s something about approaching 50 that’s very liberating. Political struggle has always been a 24-hour-a-day job for me. I felt I could never take time out for myself. Now I feel I owe it to myself to develop in ways I’ve been putting off all my life.
It seemed that most women, because they had been caught, gave up on the movement and were just trying to pass the time until they could be released. Men in prison struggled to maintain their pride, including their manhood, because that is all they had left after everything had been taken away.
The methods of peaceful protests are not capable of being effective, because in reality most people pay little attention to things that are not abrasive.
I believe in self-defense and self-determination for Africans and other oppressed people in America.