Quotes by Civil Rights Activists - Page 2

He said, one time, that no true leader burdened his followers with a greater load than they could carry, and no true leader sets too fast a pace for his follows to keep up.
Malcolm X
American musicians, instead of investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the 'people' like is poohpoohed; whatever is 'popular' is spoken of as not worth the while. The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best that he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.
James Weldon Johnson
To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace
Malcolm X
I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same language.
Malcolm X
This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely.
Malcolm X
Is some cases non-violence requires more militancy than violence.
César Chávez
I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.
Malcolm X
Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.
Malcolm X
Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: 'We don't serve colored people here.' "I said: 'that's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.
Dick Gregory
I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong. Than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.
Malcolm X
You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.
Nina Simone
Betty's a good Muslim woman and wife. I don't imagine many other women might put up with the way I am. Awakening this brainwashed black man and telling this arrogant, devilish white man the truth about himself, Betty understands, is a full-time job
Malcolm X
The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors – in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition! It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently continued to believe in a turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die philosophy! It is a miracle that the American black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught, here in white man’s heaven! The miracle is that the white man’s puppet Negro ‘leaders’, his preachers and the educated Negroes laden with degrees, and others who have been allowed to wax fat off their black poor brothers, have been able to hold the black masses quiet until now.
Malcolm X
I'm through with you. Yes, I am going to put you down. From now on, I am my own God. I am going to live by the rules I se for myself. I'll discard everything I was once taught about you. Then I'll be you. I'll be my own God, living my life as I see fit. Not as Mr. Charlie says I should live it, or Mama or anybody else. I shall do as I want in this society that apparently wasn't meant for me and my kind. If you are getting angry because I am talking to you like this, then just kill me, leave me here in this graveyard dead. Maybe thats where all of us belong anyway. Maybe then we wouldn't have to suffer so much. At the rate we are being killed now, we'll all be soon dead anyway.
Anne Moody
History will judge societies and governments — and their institutions — not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless.
César Chávez
It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.
Malcolm X
Many people in this country who want to see us the minority, and who don’t want to see us taking too militant or too uncompromising a stand, are absolutely against the successful regrouping or organising of any faction in this country whose thought and whose thinking pattern is international rather than national… There’s a world wide revolution going on, it goes beyond Mississippi, it goes beyond Alabama, it goes beyond Harlem. What is it revolting against? The power structure. The American power structure? No. The French power structure? No. The English power structure? No. Then, what power structure? An international Western power structure.
Malcolm X
If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.
Malcolm X
The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use.
Ella Baker
You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
Malcolm X
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who is for or against it.
Malcolm X
Strong people don't need strong leaders.
Ella Baker
We've got to work to save our children and do it with full respect for the fact that if we do not no one else is going to do it.
Dorothy Height
I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and my mother, impatiently, would tell them no. But I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted. I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn't be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.
Malcolm X
All of us - who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries - were, instead, black victims of the white man's American social system.
Malcolm X
The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action.
Malcolm X
The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best that he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.
James Weldon Johnson
My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
Malcolm X
I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda… I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
Malcolm X
Always be smarter than the people who hire you.
Lena Horne
America's racism is among their own fellow whites. That's where sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.
Malcolm X
Never ask a woman about other men.Either she'll tell you a lie, and you still won't know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.
Malcolm X
Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
Malcolm X
Man has no nobler function than to defend the truth.
Mahalia Jackson
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
Malcolm X
[We're] going to change the world. One day they'll write about us. You'll see.
Viola Gregg Liuzzo
How is it possible to write one's autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?
Malcolm X
Whose starboard eyeSaw chariot 'swing low'?
James Weldon Johnson
The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba -- yes Cuba too.
Malcolm X
We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.
Harry Edwards
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.
Malcolm X
I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people.
Rosa Parks
Recuerdo que algún día yo le hablé de mi río y una como tormenta se agitó en sus estrañas. No sé si fue mi pecho que tembló de recuerdo o si fueron mis ojos que asomaron nostalgias." "I remember a day when I spoke of my river and something like a storm stirred in his being. Was it my breast that trembled with the memory Was it nostalgia that showed through my eyes
Julia de Burgos
A man with a rifle or a club can only be stopped by a person who defends himself with a rifle or a club. That's equality. If the United States government doesn't want you and me to have rifles, then take the rifles away from those racists. If they don't want you and me to use clubs, take the clubs away from the racists. If they don't want you and me to get violent, then stop the racists from being violent. Don't teach us non-violence!!!
Malcolm X
The only way to reduce ugliness in the world is to reduce it in yourself,
Bayard Rustin
It is possible to become discouraged about the injustice we see everywhere. But God did not promise us that the world would be humane and just. He gives us the gift of life and allows us to choose the way we will use our limited time on earth. It is an awesome opportunity.
César Chávez
Hold your head high stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes but morning comes. ... Keep hope alive.
Jesse Jackson
We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community... Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.
César Chávez
I want to say before I go on that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven't done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was.But people are always speculating-why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.Today, when everything that I do has an urgency, I would not spend one hour in the preparation of a book which had the ambition to perhaps titillate some readers. But I am spending many hoursbecause the full story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man's society when-soon now, in prison-I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.
Malcolm X
We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.
Malcolm X
Power never takes a back step - only in the face of more power.
Malcolm X
In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life.
James Weldon Johnson
I'm sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.
Malcolm X
Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.
Malcolm X
People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.
Malcolm X
There is nothing in our book, the Qur'an, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays a hand on you, send him to the cemetery.
Malcolm X
I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.
Malcolm X
Someday the sun is going to shine down on me in some faraway place.
Mahalia Jackson
Hold your head high stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes but morning comes. ... Keep hope alive.
Jesse Jackson
It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.
James Weldon Johnson