You degrade us and then ask why we are degraded. You shut our mouths and ask why we don't speak. You close your colleges and seminaries against us and then ask why we don't know.

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

Once you read, you will be free forever.

I ask you...to adopt the principles proclaimed by yourselves, by your revolutionary fathers, and by the old bell in Independence Hall.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.

Praying for freedom never did me any good til I started praying with my feet.