Ilyasah Shabazz Quotes

Black History Month is a poignant time for the entire country, but particularly the African American community.

Black Americans are the only people in history who are for education instead of liberation. George Washington wasn't beating up on British for the right to open a college! The line isn't "Give me education or give me death."

What I think is really great about this movie [42], that young people who weren't there will have a chance to have the visceral experience of what Jackie Robinson went through.

From the Cooperative League, I suppose, with the Depression lingering as long as it did, the next step in terms of, as you call it, professional relationship, was to go to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP]. I went there as an assistant field secretary, and so forth. So, I suppose that was the first organized step.

It's not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it's the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson.

Malcolm X already envisioning the N.O.I. playing a role cooperatively with integrationist organizations.

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

Ali... we should have gone to see that movie. Malcolm X was another one.

African American history is really American history because African Americans really helped build this country.

The Black Panther Party was not a gang. They grew out of a young black intelligentsia on college campuses.

In '42,' it's like the '40s where racial equality had come into the consciousness of a lot of people, whereas in the 1900s it was sort of a new thing.

Her continuity - you know, if you connect Harriet Tubman, who died in 1913, to Rosa Parks, born in 1913, you get this extraordinary spectrum of the African-American experience.

We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.

Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

If they had not murdered Malcolm X, there probably never would have been a Black Panther Party.

Black history is American history.

'Malcolm X' was impressionable for me as a kid.

We must canonize our own saints, create our own martyrs … black men and women who have made their distinct contributions to our racial history.

We should understand the impact that Malcolm had on the whole of American society.

Through protest - especially in the 1950s and '60s - we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.

I grew up reading Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Black history is American history. You cannot tell one story without telling the other.

When I began my political career, I identified with Malcolm X.

Martin Luther King can have his own self-titled birthday recognized as a national holiday, but not our country's first president?

African-American history is American history.