I think that you're just as close to Jesus if you use the equipment he gave you other than to call on him to do for you what you can do for yourself.

We probably have, right now, after the Civil Rights movement - and this was very unfortunate - the most glaring time of giving up on Africa, saying we're Americans. We are Americans. I'm not arguing that point. So are the Italians. So are the Germans. So are the Jews. We're Americans with an historical geography of origins outside of the United States as all people, maybe except the indigenous Americans who came here so long ago, who have generations of people whose historical origins are right here but whose initial historical origins are somewhere in Asia.

Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'

Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact

I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.

A people's relationship to their heritage is the same as the relationship of a child to its mother.

Every form of true education trains the student in self-reliance