Malcolm X Quotes

If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho' we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny.

As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime or even in their children's lifetime or even in their grandchildren's lifetime. So fatalism isn't really an option.

I knew racial discrimination at its worst in the 1930s. I lived with the humility of it but I never lost my sense of humor. Humor is the escape valve from the deadly reality of adversity.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustices and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

If you think your lot in life has been hard read “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington, and you may see how fortunate you have been.

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

They don't stand for anything different in South Africa than America stands for. The only difference is over there they preach as well as practice apartheid. America preaches freedom and practices slavery.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

The most wretched have yet hope.

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State [instead of colonizing them]? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

The South opposes the civil rights of Negroes and their protection by law. Witness lynchings where no one is punished, witness the Jim Crow laws that deny the letter and spirit of the Constitution. For democracy to have real meaning, the Negro must have the same civil rights as any other American citizen. It seems obvious that the South does not yet know what this war is all about

The more I'm persecuted, the stronger I get.

Embrace the grind because it was once taken from me.

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

My life has crept so long on a broken wing Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear, That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing.

Labour to grow better under all your afflictions, lest your afflictions grow worse, lest God mingle them with more darkness, bitterness and terror.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

As I like to say to the people in Montgomery: "The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.

Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection, despite its ugliness.

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

I will not doubt, though sorrows fall like rain, And troubles swarm like bees about a hive; I shall believe the heights for which I strive Are only reached by anguish and by pain; And though I groan and tremble with my crosses, I yet shall see, through my severest losses, The greater gain.

Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren't free but I'm sure they enjoyed fireworks.

Thus, during those nineteen years of torture and slavery, did this soul rise and fall at the same time. Light entered on the one side, and darkness on the other.

To be Negro in America is to hope against hope.