A segregated school system produces children who, when they graduate, they do with crippled minds.

We're not Americans, we're Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock - that rock landed on us.

The thing that has made the so-called Negro in America fail, more than any other thing, is your, my, lack of knowledge concerning history. We know less about history than anything else.

How can a Negro say America is his nation? He was brought here in chains; he was put in slavery an worked like a mule for three hundred years; he was separated from his land, his culture, his God, his language!

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.

Without education, you are not going anywhere in this world.

If I did see a white man who was willing to go to jail or throw himself in front of a car in behalf of the so-called "negro cause," the test that I'd put to him, I'd ask him, "Do you think negro, when Negroes are being attacked they should defend themselves even at the risk of having to kill the one who's attacking them?" If that white man told me, "Yes," I'd shake his hand.