Malcolm X Quotes

If white America is ready to extend complete democratic rights to colored people, there will be no race, no racial tension and no racial prejudice on either side, but we can be sure that any movement 'back to normalcy' in race relations will be bitterly resisted by colored people. It is now up to white America to make its choice...

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.

Until the white man in America sits down and talks with The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, he won't even know what the race problem - what makes the race problem what it is.

Solve the race problem here, and once you solve the race problem here, you don't have to send these billions of dollars abroad.

I know that so many of us hoped that, by electing our first black president, we had turned the page on this chapter in our history. But, despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America's long struggle with race is far from finished.

Despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America's long struggle with race is far from finished.

Racial problems can't be easily reconciled with a pat account about racism and discrimination that lets us sort of relax into saying when we finally get this right, when we get rid of racism, when we reach the post-racial society, everything is going to be okay. Well, no, because along the way here, as we've not yet been in this racial nirvana, facts on the ground have been created.

People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.

Few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks.

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites …

The relation between the white and colored people of this country is the great, paramount, imperative, and all-commanding question for this age and nation to solve

We never discuss race until something bad happens.

The white race is doomed not because it's white but because of its misdeeds.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.

I think "post-racial" is a dangerous trap. You can fall into complacency and give your complicity a much more dangerous character.

The conversation about race is inevitable. It's one that people know that we have to have and continue to have.

The Negro who experiences bitter and agonizing circumstances as a result of some ungodly white person is tempted to look upon all white persons as evil, if he fails to look beyond his circumstances. But the minute he looks beyond his circumstances and sees the whole of the situation, he discovers that some of the most implacable and vehement advocates of racial equality are consecrated white persons.

There are definitely racial problems in this country [the USA]. Comedy is a way we can figure out how to solve it, and how to solve it without making people really angry.

I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.

The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

The promise of Obama's presidency, in many people's minds, is partly that America will move toward becoming a post-racial society. It's pretty clear, though, that we aren't there yet.

I believe there are certainly racial problems in this country, and I believe that peaceful solutions can help bring the races together.

The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. No thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.

It did not improve the feeling of the defeated classes of the South to contemplate, at first, the amendments of the Constitution of the United States, which not only established the freedom of the slave, but established his citizenship beyond question, and putting into his hands the ballot, making him the political equal of his former owner. Objecting not only to the law, but to that practice under it, … the former master class became greatly exasperated, and resolving, if possible, to overcome this condition of things, organized bands of "White-liners," "Ku-Klux," and "Bull-dozers," and entered upon that systematic warfare upon Republicans, white and colored, which, resulting in violence, intimidation and murder, has necessitated the use of the army to maintain the peace, and protect the loyal people of the South against that domestic violence, which at times seemed to threaten utter destruction, interfering even with legislatures, and disturbing the operations of the Government.