Muhammad Ali Quotes

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

There's no lobby for more spending on Black people in the cities.

No man can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves black people after they’re born, so that the only acts that white people can do is to stop denying black people their freedom; that is, they must stop denying freedom. They never give it to anyone.

The success of the few does not excuse the caste-like system that exists for many. In fact, black exceptionalism - the high-profile, highly visible examples of the black success - actually serves to justify and rationalize mass incarceration.

The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

If you're African American, you are forced into making different choices, in a lot of cases, than you are as a white person.

We're not willing to give black leaders second chances because, in most cases, we're not willing to give them first chances.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

Many African-American men are incarcerated. And so African-American women do carry an enormous burden. And traditionally have carried a greater burden than perhaps their white counterparts.

The reason why you were allowed to get away with that in the '60s and '70s is because this country's racist administrative policies were such that rich white kids were getting exemptions. I said no exemptions.

When you allow racial disparity and institutional inequity to affect one part of the country, eventually it's coming back to get everyone.

We don't want something for youth at risk, we want something for black youth at risk.

The world has made being black a crime .... I hope to make it a virtue.

... if the United States is indeed the great melting pot, the Negro either didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.

If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.

… a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through

I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It's harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.

For too long, I think the African-American community has been taken for granted by one party and completely ignored by the other. It is not acceptable. It's not good for the parties, for the country, or for the community.

If there is inequality, and that equates with colour, then I'm going to deal with it.

Freedom in America was not always flat. Racism made it un-flat, so that some people had privileges over other people.

I realized that with African American people, where we've been blocked from being all that God meant for us to be, I don't have time to be patient.