When you have your own bus, then you have dignity. When you have your own school, you have dignity. When you have your own country, you have dignity.When you have something of your own, you have dignity. But whenever you are begging for a chance to participate in that which belongs to someone else, or use that which belongs to someone else, on an equal basis with the owner, that's not dignity. That's ignorance.
Malcolm XIf I may add, for instance, [Martin Luther] King and these others will say that they are fighting for the Negro to have equal job opportunity. How can people, a group of people, such as our people, who own no factories, have equal job opportunities competing against the race that owns the factories?The only way the two can have equal job opportunities is if black people have factories as, as well as white people have factories.
Malcolm XA ballot is like a bullet. You don't throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.
Malcolm XUntil the image of the black man in the mind of the black man has been changed, there will always be delinquency, parental and juvenile. The idea is not to change the attitude of the white man to the black man but to change the attitude of the black man to himself.
Malcolm XAmerican civil rights leader, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Lynching is a murder. For the past four hundred years our people have been lynched physically, but now it's done politically. We're lynched politically, we're lynched economically, we're lynched socially, we're lynched in every way that you can imagine.
Malcolm XThe other slaves in the field never let that house slave knew - know what they were really thinking. If the house slave said, well one of these days all of us will live in the plantation, they said, uh huh. They went along with him. But if you came up to them and said, let's go, they would be gone just like that.And in, in America you have the same situation.You have the vast masses who are still slaves.
Malcolm X