Quote collection
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"He [liberal white person] may stand with you through thin, but not thick; when the chips are down, you'll find that as fixed in him as his bone structure is his sometimes subconscious conviction that he's better than anybody black."
"Eleanor Roosevelt could easily have told negroes the deceitful maneuvering of the United States government that was going on behind the scenes. She never did it. In my opinion she was just another white woman whose profession was to make it appear that she was on the negro's side. You have a lot of whites who are in this category. Therefore, they have made negro loving a profession."
"...What we need to do in the community, and in the city, and in the state. We need to stop airing our differences in front of the white man. Put the white man out of our meetings, number one, and then sit down and talk shop with each other. [That's] all you gotta do."
"We don't think that we're begging for anything. We think we're demanding what is ours by right. And all we're asking for is an opportunity to do something for ourselves, rather than to sit around as a beggar, begging for jobs and begging for education from - for someone else for the rest of our lives."
"[At a young age] I had learned enough about women to know not to pressure them when they're thinking something out; they'll tell you when they're ready."
"Do something for yourself, and then you will be recognized by the entire world as a man who has done for himself what others have done for themselves."
"We do not condemn the preachers as an individual but we condemn what they teach. We urge that the preachers teach the truth, to teach our people the one important guiding rule of conduct - unity of purpose."
"Whenever I walk the street and see people ready to get with it, that's my reward."
"I grew up in the country on a farm it was whenever someone said even that a snake was eating the chickens or bothering the chickens, we'd kill snakes. We never knew whether that was the snake that did it."
"If I can't run my neighborhood you won't want me in your neighborhood."
"Why should [Uncle Sam] send 20 billion dollars down there [South America], which is going to go down the drain every time you have a racial in - incident in this country?"
"A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched."
"Abraham Lincoln was interested in, in saving the Union. Well, most negroes have been tricked into thinking that Lincoln was a negro lover whose primary aim was to free them, and he died because he freed them."
"Because once the black man becomes the political master of his own community, it means that the politicians of that community will also be black, which also means that he then will be sending black representation or representatives not only to represent him at the local level and at the state level, but, but even at the federal level."
"Only a man who is ashamed of what he is will marry out of his race."
"No one should advocate any peaceful suffering to black people, unless the black - white man is going to practice the same kind of peaceful suffering."
"We must control the politics and the politicians of our community. They must no longer take orders from outside forces. We will organize, and sweep out of office all Negro politicians who are puppets for the outside forces."
"In order, in order to enforce you can't force people to act right toward each other. You can't force, you cannot legislate heart, conditions and attitudes."
"In this country, these Negro leaders have Negroes sittin' - sitting down, thinking that that - there's dignity towards sitting in."
"When a man understands who he is, who God is, who the devil is... then he can pick himself up out of the gutter; he can clean himself up and stand up like a man should before his God."