Malcolm X Quotes

History proves that the white man is a devil.

Slavery was our original sin. Race, our continuing dilemma.

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal President. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.

Homophobia, racism, and sexism are all rooted in the same oppression that causes a group of people to internalize the oppression they've experienced and then continue the cycle of abuse. Simply put, hurt people hurt people.

Racism is a form of hate. We pass it on to our young people. When we do that, we are robbing children of their innocence.

White folk done took this country. You're in their home, and they're gonna let you know it.You are not now, nor have you ever been, nor will you ever be a brother to white folk and if you do not realize that, you are in serious trouble.

White supremacy is the conscious or unconscious belief or the investment in the inherent superiority of some, while others are believed to be innately inferior. And it doesn't demand the individual participation of the singular bigot. It is a machine operating in perpetuity, because it doesn't demand that somebody be in place driving.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

Defeating racism, tribalism, intolerance and all forms of discrimination will liberate us all, victim and perpetrator alike.

The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling... How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?

Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.

White people just don't want their slaves to be free. That's the whole thing.

The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

We are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... he has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

They (negroes) had for more than a century before the Declaration of Independence been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it.

The black world squirms beneath the feet of the white in impotent fury or sullen hate.

You complain that Negroes are a base class. Who makes and keeps the Jew or the Negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?

They are mostly my old political and personal friends …. Of their principles I think little better than I do of those of the slavery extensionists. Indeed I do not perceive how any one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of the Negroes, can join in any league to degrade a class of white men.

The two things I feared as a boy most were rattlesnakes and white people.

That means nigger citizenship!!!

The black herring of intermarriage has been dragged too often across the trail to justice. 'Would you want your sister to marry a nigger?' is still the question that is supposed to stun any white man who sponsors rights for Negroes. It stirs Negroes to ironic laughter, although on all levels they recognize the white man's fear of intermarriage as deep seated…

The North is fighting simply to turn loose all the niggers and whitewash the niggers in the blood of millions

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.