[Black nationalism] is not designed to make the black man reevaluate the white man--you know him already--but to make the black man re-evaluate himself. Don't change the white man's mind; you can't change his mind. And that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America--America's conscience is bankrupt.

I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism.

We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity.

You don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-cheek revolution. There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.

A race of people is like and individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.

If all the white people who claim they don't hate us would ever get together and do something to the whites who claim they hate us, we'd see some action. Talk is cheap, if white people didn't want to have a South African situation ... there'd be none. If white people in America didn't want segregation, there'd be none ... it is the man who allows him to lynch who is never seen.

Eleanor Roosevelt could easily have told negroes the deceitful maneuvering of the United States government that was going on behind the scenes. She never did it. In my opinion she was just another white woman whose profession was to make it appear that she was on the negro's side. You have a lot of whites who are in this category. Therefore, they have made negro loving a profession.