The 22 million or 30 million, whatever the case may be, Afro-Americans in the United States were still Africans.

I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.

The white man is a devil. If he is not a devil, let him prove it!

A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched.

When I was in prison, I read an article - don't be shocked when I say I was in prison. You're still in prison. That's what America means: prison.

I'm trying to get at this. That is, a man may know that he belongs to, say, a group - this group or that group - but he feels himself lost within that group, trapped within his own deficiencies and without personal purpose.

The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites.