I am not antiwhite, because I understand that white people, like black ones, are victims of a racist society. They are products of their time and place.

Rhetoric never won a revolution yet.

We have been so patient and loyal ... and what has it gotten us? We want our full share now.

Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.

We Americans have a chance to become someday a nation in which all racial stocks and classes can exist in their own selfhoods, but meet on a basis of respect and equality and live together, socially, economically, and politically.

One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian.

That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.