Vic Mensa Quotes

I've been trying to understand conflict and violence ever since I was a kid. You know. There were a few things that happened even on my block - the Black Panthers used to be right around the corner from where we were.

I learned a lot about evasiveness, and how racists could use a system to forestall equality. I also learned a lot riding those dusty roads and walking into those sullen hostile courts in Jackson, Mississippi. It just seems that unless something's pushed, unless you litigate, nothing happens.

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.

My earliest memories are of the civil rights era. My earliest experiences were rage.

For a black student to work in southwest Mississippi for example - or in the Delta in 1960, 1961, 1962 - was high-risk work.

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.

We will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder

I can't help but believe that at some time in the not-too-distant future, there is going to be another movement to change these systemic conditions of poverty, injustice, and violence in people's lives. That is where we've got to go, and it is going to be a struggle.

When Trump says, 'Make America great again,' he is referencing an era when people were singled out and harmed because of their race and religious beliefs, and when violent enforcement of Jim Crow masqueraded as the will of the people.

I think Charlottesville was shocking for some, but it wasn't for me or for my family, I mean, because I grew up in 1980s Nashville.

In order to cry out for my black brothers, I had to hate the police.

We run into police brutality often and it's always a problem that we always have to protest and speak out.

I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.

I'm not a docile, complacent person when it comes to racial aggressions.

I waited at the counter of a white restaurant for eleven years. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted.

We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

America in its entirety is segregationist and is racist. It's more camouflaged in the north, but it's the same thing.

In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

Many are observing Ferguson and witnessing the anger, demonstrations, looting and vandalism and calling for quiet. But quiet isn't enough. The absence of noise isn't the presence of justice - and we must demand justice in Ferguson and the other 'Fergusons' around America.

If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.

We've begun to put fear into those whites who think they can do anything they want to a black person and get away with it.

Although black and white Americans live, work, and learn together now, there is still injustice in America.