Muhammad Ali Quotes

My organization, National Action Network (NAN), was on the ground talking and meeting with people in Ferguson, just as we did in Staten Island following Eric Garner's death.

We are looking at live pictures at this moment of a protest that is happening in Atlanta, Georgia, I believe, that has been assembled by the NAACP in protest, of course, of the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott.

When he brought it to me four years ago, Rodney King had just arrived, I was involved in the clean-up of L.A. and I guess it was part of my experience.

We have not always agreed, but I have said repeatedly and publicly many times that Al Sharpton has never counseled violence, but he gets blamed for a whole lot of that.

The riot isn't seen in the movie, but it is alluded to. He has this one speech that gives a great sense of texture and paints a picture of what was happening in Harlem then.

I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s and find a way to get in the way. To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.

At some point in time, we're going to have to stop addressing the kneeling, and we're going to have to start addressing what led Colin Kaepernick to kneel. That's the issue that nobody wants to talk about.

The thing that happened in Ferguson touched many of us in a specific way.

It is just not something we need to forget easily, to just bend the knee, to put on our t-shirts, Black Lives Matter, and one week after everyone forgets that.

Where is the raised voice of black America? Why are we mute?

It's not easy to be a martyr in the field of race relations.

Are you looking for a Negro who won't fight back?

I remember being at the church a few hours after the church was bombed in Birmingham, the 16th Street Baptist Church. It was very hard and very difficult to stand on that corner across the street from the church. Or to go Mississippi and search for the three civil rights workers who came up missing. There is a lot of trauma.

What the Black lives matter movement is doing is they are making it personal. They are making it hash tagged, exposing the racial injustice that continues to haunt our country in a way that you can't ignore. There is power in injustice becoming personal.

The only thing I really feel is necessary is that the black people, not only in Mississippi, will have to actually upset this applecart. What I mean by that is, so many things are under the cover that will have to be swept out and shown to this whole world, not just to America. This thing they say of "the land of the free and the home of the brave" is all on paper.

I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.

It's not enough to say we need to love each other, you have to go behind that and say we need to change these policies, we need to fight, we need to protest, we need to agitate for change.

How many of y'all wondered, like I did, during the LA riots when those people were being pulled out of their trucks and beaten half to death - step on the f***ing gas, man! They're on foot, you're in a truck - I think I see a way out of this.

When the thing is finally sparked, the white man is not there - he's gone. The merchant is not there, the landlord is not there, the one they consider to be the enemy isn't there. So, they knock at his property. This is what makes them knock down the store windows and set fire to things, and things of that sort.

You got two black folk representing us through the Sixties. One of them was for violence, one was against it, and they both are dead.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there.

If I were a person of color in Florida, I would pick up a brick and start walking toward that courthouse in Sanford. Those that do not, those that hold the pain and betrayal inside and somehow manage to resist violence - these citizens are testament to a stoic tolerance that is more than the rest of us deserve. I confess, their patience and patriotism is well beyond my own.

My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest…I did a lot of walking in Montgomery.

When I first went to jail in 1960 with seven classmates trying to use their public library against the backdrop of my father being a veteran of World War II, not being able to use - having to sit behind Nazi on American military bases, I lost my fear of jails and death.