Integration will not bring a man back from the grave.
If you are Black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. As long as you are South of the Canadian border, you are South.
If you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you’ll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies.
Only the mistakes were mine.
When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent.
I don’t have any hate. I’ve got some sense. I’m not going to let anybody who hates me tell me to love him. I’m not that way-out.
Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and thereby increase self-respect. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
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.
I think that the best thing that a person can be is sincere.