Oppression of African Americans Quotes

What we call soul has been around a long time. It comes out of a particular culture that is African in origin, but influenced by 250 years of slavery, as well as other forms of racial oppression.

The haughty American nation ... makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.

There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.

I looked on the television the other night and saw them beating a Negro unmercifully in Mississippi. And this is the result of a brainwashing technique, a certain power structure in the American government has paid these Negro integrationist leaders to perpetuate among our people. But it's not a good thing, and it will never solve our problem.

The strongest argument against this unnatural war upon negro slavery in one section by another of the same common country, is that it inevitably drives to disunion of the states, embittered with all the vengeful hate of civil war.

Since the white people collectively have practiced the worst form of hatred against Negroes in America and they know that they are guilty of it, now when The Honorable Elijah Muhammad comes along and begins to list the historic deed - the historic attitude, the historic behavior of the white man in this country toward the black people in this country, again, the white people are so guilty and they can't stop doing these things to make Mr. Muhammad appear to be wrong, so they hide their wrong by saying "he is teaching hatred."

It is only the Negro leadership, the bourgeois, hand-picked, handful of Negroes who think that they're going to get some kind of respect, recognition, or protection from the Government.

Since the nation's founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.