Killer Mike Quotes

My only crime was being born black - or being born black in Alabama.

When the residue of oppression and fear are compounded over time, when the historical precedents of policing and discrimination manifest themselves over and over again, the very act of waking up to a world complicit in your distress can feel like a herculean task. But black people are human beings, just like everyone else.

Being a black person in America is exhausting.

I have to be honest: I feel like I live in a constant state of rage, and I think a lot of black people do.

It's a struggle for every young Black man. You know how it is, only God can judge us.

While he was in the service, in the South and in Oklahoma, he was refused service at a couple of places where he was in uniform, and was told that African Americans, blacks, Negros, were not served. And in spite of that, I've never known a man who loved this country more than my father did.

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.

Arizona has always been anti-black.

I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.

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

By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching.

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.

The trials my father went through were things most young black males have to go through. There was nothing he shielded from me, because it doesn't matter how you grow up, those who oppress will oppress. It's all completely relatable; everyone feels NWA.

Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!

I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.

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.

He was murdered by every member of the gospel who has remained silent about racial discrimination—who has hidden behind the stained glass windows of his church.. He was murdered by every Negro who accepted segregation.

Our ears are saluted from the east and west, north and south alike saying: I like a Negro in his place. But there are no two communities which agree as to his proper place. So they have been trying to fix him in first one place and then in another; but just as soon as public sentiment changed, or he saw an opportunity, he changed to such places as he thought his intelligence, industry, courage and endurance commanded.

One hundred years ago the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin…. The negro today asks for justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we answer “Patience.”

History looks very different from a black point of view. The heroes are different, and the eras get different names. The Progressive Era is no longer the Progressive Era, because it's the era in which more black people are lynched than in any other period in American history.

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

You spend your whole lifetime in your occupation, actually making life clever, easy and convenient for white people. But when you have to get transportation home, you are denied an equal accommodation. Our existence was for the white man's comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human.

I'm hoping that somehow with songs like 'American Gold' there will be some kind of justice, and people just stop being so close-minded to where they're like, 'Oh, it's not race.' It's easy to say that when you're not black and you haven't experienced it.

Sammy was the only one that looked like me, so I naturally gravitated to him. Sammy made it cool to be black at a time when, let's just say it, it wasn't very cool to be black. His name was on the front of the building in lights, and he had to go in the back. But you never saw him sweat.

In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.