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.

I think you'll find also that if the negro ever realizes that he should begin to fight for real for his freedom, there are many whites who will fight on his side with him.

I believe that it would be almost impossible to find anywhere in America a black man who has lived further down in the mud of human society than I have; or a black man who has been any more ignorant than I have; or a black man who has suffered more anguish during his life than I have. But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

I could turn around as Wyatt Walker said to me about, not you personally, but about the whole Black Muslim movement. That if you go outside of New York City, Dr. [Martin Luther] King is known to 90 percent of the Negroes in the United States and is respected and, and is identified more or less with him, at least as a hero of one kind or another. That the Black Muslim, outside of one or two communities like New York, are unknown.

It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent. Everything in the universe does something when you start playing with his life, except the American Negro. He lays down and says, 'Beat me, daddy.'

Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate.

They don't stand for anything different in South Africa than America stands for. The only difference is over there they preach as well as practice apartheid. America preaches freedom and practices slavery.