Louis Farrakhan Quotes

In 2016, the conversation of the black experience is so broad, and it's very raw. I mean, c'mon, we have a black president. That's a major thing, and there are so many other significant occurrences that have come from the '60s and '70s up to now.

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.

We're primarily interested in solving the problem of 20 million black people. And if integration is going to solve the problem tomorrow, then let's integrate. But since the Supreme Court issued its desegregation decision seven years ago, and you only have about six or seven percent integration now, on an educational level, that means that the black man trying to use integration as a means of solving his problem will be another 100 years just getting integration on an educational level.

I think the way the country has changed in part because of the presidency of Barack Obama, I think in part because of what we've - the violence that we have seen on our cell phones and our TV sets over the last couple of years. I think Black Lives Matter has helped to force these issues. Women like Sabrina Fulton. We're having a different conversation in this country right now about race and what it means to really understand your experience is and my experience is.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

As long as Negro leader is making the white man think that our people are satisfied to sit in his house and wait for him to correct these conditions, he is - he is misrepresenting the thinking of the black masses, and he's doing the white man a disservice because he's making the white man be more complacent than he would be if he knew the dangerous situation that is building up right inside his own house.

What the white man in America needs to realize is there's a new thinking among black people today which makes them not willing to sit around and wait for five years to get this problem solved, much less a hundred years.

10 years ago the black man knew what his condition was. And today, because of the world revolution that's taking place all over this earth, the black man would be fighting for what he knows is his by right, but the movement on the part of [Martin Luther] King and the others had done nothing but slow down the militancy that is inherent in the nature of the black man.

I'm a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man's house on fire, you don't hear these little Negroes talking about 'our government is in trouble'. They say, 'The government is in trouble.'

Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.

We blacks had problems in the '60s and we solved them by marching. We've still got problems - let's march.

I was born in '58, so the riot in Detroit in 1967 was a memorable introduction to the issue of race and how race made a difference in American society. And then the next year, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. And the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series. All of that made a huge impression on my growing mind.

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!

That's where Dr. [Martin Luther] King is mixed up. His goals should be the solution of the problem of the black man in America.

I am of the generation of segregation. Black Lives Matter is post. I said today, and I will say all the time, "If Nina [Simone] were here, she'd have her Black Lives Matter [T-shirt] on." I think they're great kids. They don't need me or anybody else to tell them what to do.

In America, you can segregate the people, but the problems will travel. From slavery to equal rights, from state suppression of dissent to crime, drugs and unemployment, I can't think of a supposedly Black issue that hasn't wasted the original Black target group and then spread like measles to outlying white experience.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

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. It doesn't really mean anything to us. The only way we can make this thing a reality in America is to do all we can to destroy this system and bring this out to the light that has been under the cover all these years.

Here you have 22 million Afro-Americans, black people today, catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw. And I'm here to tell you, in case you don't know it, that you got a new - you got a new generation of black people in this country, who don't care anything whatsoever about odds. They don't want to hear you old Uncle Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds.

Black people cannot look to government to solve their problems.

The separate water foundations, park benches, bathrooms and restaurants of the Jim Crow South startled me. These experiences motivated my lifelong study of the status of African Americans and the sources of improvement in that status.

An organization which claims to be working for the needs of a community - as SNCC does - must work to provide that community with a position of strength from which to make its voice heard. This is the significance of black power beyond the slogan.

Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, North Carolina.

The center of gravity has shifted from the courts to community action.

Black people know what white people mean when they say “law and order”.