Negro Quotes - page 25
The average Negro has not been sufficiently mis-educated to become hopeless.
Our minds must become sufficiently developed to use segregation to kill segregation, and thus bring to pass that ancient and yet modern prophecy, "The wrath of man shall praise thee." If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto. This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible. If the Negro area, however, is to continue as a district supported wholly from without, the inept dwellers therein will merit and will receive only the contempt of those who may occasionally catch glimpses of them in their plight.
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Carter Woodson
On the same sod, where (Rapine's helpless prey,)
The plumed Indian, pin'd his life away,
Enslav'd, degraded, doom'd to vile employ,
Deploring still the rifled hive of joy,
There the poor Negro, shackled with the chain,
Rears, by his sweltering toil, the nectar'd cane;
And, wretched exile from his brighter skies,
Breathes o'er the native's grave complaining sighs,
Unconscious on what dust he treads, nor knows
Whose place he takes, whose heritage of woes.
Elizabeth Benger
I met Malcolm X once in Washington, but circumstances didn't enable me to talk with him for more than a minute. He is very articulate ... but I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views - at least insofar as I understand where he now stands. I don't want to seem to sound self-righteous, or absolutist, or that I think I have the only truth, the only way. Maybe he does have some of the answer. I don't know how he feels now, but I know that I have often wished that he would talk less of violence, because violence is not going to solve our problem. And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice. Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.
Martin Luther King Jr.