When people laugh at your institutions and convince you that you have to adopt theirs - adopt their dress, adopt their taste in food - you are a prisoner to those people.

My mother really held the family together. She was a perfect example of the kind of black woman I would love to see again. She ruled my father with an iron hand, yet she barely ever raised her voice above a whisper.

The white woman has never had the co-equal status that the African woman has had.

Your group has a right and responsibility to preside over your behavior and you have a responsibility to make that behavior in a manner that does not endanger the group.

When Marcus Garvey died in 1940, the role of the British Empire was already being challenged by India and the rising expectations of her African colonies. Marcus Garvey's avocation of African redemption and the restoration of the African state's sovereign political entity in world affairs was still a dream without fulfillment.

If we are going to be masters of our destiny, we must be masters of the ideas that influence that destiny.

We never see ourselves as heroes and sometimes when we do it is a hero that has made a fortune as a clown or a boxer. And there is no lasting value in either one of those.