Quotes About Empowerment

a man unreservedly committed to the cause of liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society.

Negroes know what I'm talking about. Back then, the white man during the war was so pressed for personnel that he began letting some Negroes put down their buckets and mops and dust rags and use a pencil, or sit at some desk, or hold some 25 cent title.

He saw in this the road to a new sense of group identity, a self-conscious role in history, and above all a sense of man's own worth which he claimed the white man had destroyed in the Negro.

I don't think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did.

I knew right there in prison that reading had forever changed the course of my life.

If you're afraid of black nationalism, you're afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism.

Elijah Muhammad spoke of how the black man was Original Man, who had been kidnapped from his homeland and stripped of his language, his culture, his family structure, his family name, until the black man in America did not even realize who he was.

My application had, of course, been made and during this time I received from Chicago my 'X.' The Muslim's 'X' symbolized the true African family name that he could never know. For me, my X replaced the white slavemaster name of 'Little,' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal fore-bearers. The receipt of my X meant that forever after in the nation of Islam I would be known as Malcolm X.

I simply refused to believe.

Speaking like this doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression.

Now then, you have the masses of black people in this country who are the offshoot of the field Negro, during slavery. They are the masses. They are the ones who are jobless. They are the last hired and the first fired.

I got on top of a car and began waving my arms and yelling at them to quiet down. They did quiet down, and then I asked them to disperse - and they did.

For the freedom of my 22 million black brothers and sisters here in America, I do believe that I have fought the best that I knew how, and the best that I could, with the shortcomings that I have had. I know that my shortcomings are many.

We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters—Plymouth Rock landed on us!

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.

In the ghettoes the white man has built for us, he has forced us not to aspire to greater things, but to view everyday living as survival-and in that kind of a community, survival is what is respected.

I had learned early one important thing, and that was to always teach in terms that the people could understand.

I have learned to hate every drop of white rapist blood that is in me

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 followers to Keep up.

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If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading.

John Viscount Morley.

Here was a man, who had come from the lower depths which they still inhabited, who had triumphed over his own criminality and his own ignorance to become a forceful leader and spokesman, an uncompromising champion of his people.

And that was how, after twelve years of never thinking for as much as five minutes about myself, I became able finally to muster the nerve, and the strength, to start facing the facts, to think for myself.