You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress.

God is more lasting than the white man.

Can you accuse me, if a man is putting a rope around my neck, of being violent, when I violently struggle against this lyncher to try and keep him from putting a rope around my innocent neck? Why, you'd be insane to cause me - to call me violent.

After Hitler was destroyed, there was the threat of Stalin, but it was always the world pressure that was upon America that enabled black people to go forward. It was not the initiative internally that the Negro put forth in America, nor was it a change of moral heart on the part of Uncle Sam it was world pressure.

To me, political action involves making the politician who represents us know that he either produces or he is out, and he's out one way or another.

People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.

The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites.