Many people in Harlem never go out of Harlem. I mean they'd never even been downtown. And you can see how this bitterness can accumulate. Here you see people crowded and hovered up in ghettos and slums with no hope.They see no way out.

I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

Just as it is the duty of all men to obey just laws, so it is the duty of all men to disobey unjust laws.

The Negroes of America had taken the President, the press and the pulpit at their word when they spoke in broad terms of freedom and justice. But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood.

We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny . . . I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.

The white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education. In one sense it is more evil for them because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.

Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for a people seeking to rise out of poverty and backwardness.