We assert that in those areas where the government is either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property of our people, that our peopie are within our rights to protect themselves by whatever means necessary.
My family was so poor we were close to eating the holes inside of doughnuts.
The cornerstones of this country’s operation are economic and political strength and power. The black man doesn’t have the economic strength – and it will take time for him to build it. But right now the American black man has the political strength and power to change his destiny overnight.
I’m for truth, no matter who tells it...
It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.
And in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody’s guess which of the ‘extremes’ in approach to the black man’s problems might personally meet a fatal catastrophe first – ‘non-violent’ Dr. King, or so-called ‘violent’ me.
Anything I do today, I regard as urgent.
Hatred and anger are powerless when met with kindness.
Every morning when I wake up, now, I regard it as having another borrowed day.
They asked if I knew what ‘conscientious objector’ meant. I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.
Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the...
That morning was when I first began to reappraise the ‘white man.’ It was when I first began to perceive that ‘white man,’ as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions.
Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.
I think that the best thing that a person can be is sincere.
The whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the wall and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth.
I think teaching a man to hate himself is much more criminal than teaching a man to hate someone else.
It isn’t the American white man who is a racist, but it’s the American political, economic and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.
The white man is not inherently evil, but America’s racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.
Where the really sincere white people have got to do their ‘proving’ of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is – and that’s in their own home communities.
America’s most dangerous and threatening black man is the one who has been kept sealed up by the Northerner in the black ghettos – the Northern white power structure’s system to keep talking democracy while keeping the black man out of sight somewhere, around the corner.