If you're black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. Long as you south of the Canadian border, you're south.

I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.

I believe in human rights for everyone, and none of us is qualified to judge each other and that none of us should therefore have that authority.

Most of the negro leaders who get the support of the power structure end up being against [Reverend] Galamison.

What does a black man look like begging for a cup of coffee in a white restaurant, and doesn't have a job to back up his - to pay for it when, when - when he does get the coffee? It's putting the cart before the horse.

By looking upon themselves as human beings, their whiteness to them isn't the yardstick of perfection or honor or anything else. And, therefore, this creates within them an attitude that is different from the attitude of the white that you meet here in America, and it was in Mecca that I realized that white is actually an attitude more so than it's a color.

The black people of America have been victims of violence at the hands of the white men for four hundred years, and following the ignorant Negro preachers, we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us.