I was sentenced to life plus 30 years by an all-White jury. What I saw in prison was wall-to-wall Black flesh in chains. Women caged in cells. But we’re the terrorists. It just doesn’t make sense.
How lovely it is to live with a sense of community. To live where you can drop in the street and a million people will come and help you.
In my case, spirituality has been important to me because at periods in my life there’s been very little else that I’ve had going. I’ve actually needed to call on, to feel the forces of good in this universe to be able to survive.
When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.
Schools in amerika are interested in brainwashing people with amerikanism, giving them a little bit of education, and training them in skills needed to fill the positions the capitalist system requires. As long as we expect amerika’s schools to educate us, we will remain ignorant.
Hip Hop can be a very effective way to reach young people and teach them about current political and social issues.
I stay connected in my head. I’m spiritually and psychologically connected to African-Americans. They are my people, and that will never change.
We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.
I think that the greatest betrayal that a revolutionary can participate in is to become like the people you are struggling against. To become like your persecutors. I think that is a betrayal and a sin.
I had grown up at a time when people were being lynched, being attacked with water hoses. Becoming active and learning a different way of viewing my life was a healthy reaction to what I was seeing every day.
I believe in life. And I have seen the death parade.
My energy just couldn’t stop dancing. I was caught up in the music of struggle, and i wanted to dance.
I don’t have to live up to that Superwoman myth. I can cry and be human and lean on people who take care of me. That can be very liberating.
Cuba has its own moral system and priorities. That’s what keeps it going, the belief that the country can control its own destiny.
The abnormal, the sick, the vicious have become more and more interwoven into the violent culture of the United States. Into the way news is seen, into the way movies are seen.
I think that one of the problems that exists in the United States and in many places in the world is that people don’t believe that they can make a difference. So a lot of times we’re defeated before we even start. We’ve become consumers of a world vision, of Kentucky Fried Chicken, of McDonalds.
Black Revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. We are shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quetin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us.
I can’t do nothin except try to find cloud nine.
I believe in living, I believe in birth, I believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth and I believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, sea sick sailors, can still be guided home to port.
It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.