The American system itself is incapable. It is as incapable of producing freedom for the Afro-American as the system of a chicken is of producing a duck egg.

Anytime there's a fire in a negro community and it's burning out of control, you send any one of them, send Whitney Young in to put it out.

You'd have civil war. You'd have a race war in this country.

At this point I hadn't yet gotten deep into the historic condition that negroes in this country are confronted with, but at that point in my prison studies I, I read, I studied Islam as a religion more so than as I later come to know it in its connection with the plight or problem of Negroes in this country.

More so than any other city on the African continent, the people of Cairo look like the American Negroes in the sense that we have all complexions, we range in America from the darkest black to the lightest light, and here in Cairo it is the same thing; throughout Egypt, it is the same thing. All of the complexions are blended together here in a truly harmonious society.

I don't care how nice one is to you, the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.

We don't think that we're begging for anything. We think we're demanding what is ours by right.