The white man will keep on granting tokenism; a few big Negroes will get big jobs, but the black masses will catch hell as long as they stay in the white man's house.

That's not a chip on my shoulder, that's your foot on my neck.

One of my brothers read a lot. His head was forever in some book.

When you aren't affiliated with anything, and then you look at something, you look at it with your eye to the best of your ability.

Among Negroes we have Negroes who are as white as some white people. Still there's a difference.

Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

You're going to have a racial explosion, and a racial explosion is more dangerous than an atomic explosion. It's going to explode because black people are dissatisfied; they're dissatisfied not only with the white man, but they're dissatisfied with these Negroes who have been sitting around here posing as leaders and spokesmen for black people and actually making the problem worse instead of making the problem better.