Malcolm X Quotes

Detroit is really a model for how wealthier and whiter Americans escape the costs of public goods they'd otherwise share with poorer and darker Americans.

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.

I saw in Chicago, on the street where I was visiting my sister-in-law, this "Urban Renewal" and it means one thing: "Negro removal." But they want to tear the homes down and put a parking lot there. Where are those people going? Where will they go? And as soon as Negroes take to the street demonstrating, one hears people say, "they shouldn't have done it." The world is looking at America and it is really beginning to show up for what it is really like. "Go Tell It on the Mountain." We can no longer ignore this, that America is not "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and-above all-economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.

There clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what's happening to African American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities is almost zero. The history is striking.

Race is a huge factor when it comes to income and social inequality, and it plays a role in the structural barriers you are talking about. But when you're in the upper echelon of the 1 percent - even though it's certainly a more white demographic overall - there are fewer barriers.

I was born on an island with 96 percent of the people black. But all the power and the economy was in the hands of white people who only formed four per cent.

We don't have a full black community in Boston. Our people are scattered. There's a middle class where I live in Highland Park but it's not like a piece of Washington or Chicago.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

We can't have Harlem become one borough for the rich.

All my life had been dominated by a sign, often invisible but no less real for that, which said: 'Reserved for Europeans Only.'

The Occupy movement has drawn attention to how too many in the 1 percent get to play by their own rules while exploiting the 99 percent.

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a little worse for America's minorities relative to the progress made by those in the top percentiles of assets and income.

The migration of the black middle class out of the cities in the wake of the civil rights movement and the deindustrialization of urban economies has left a corroded core, cut off from the social; mainstream and reliant on inadequate federal support.

I don’t believe in Black majority rule ever—not even in 1000 years.

Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality.

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

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

African American Communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they've ever been before. Ever, ever, ever.

I don't want our white working class sisters and brothers to feel as though their pain is not important because it is. But at the same time, I want my white sisters and brothers to understand that when we talk about income and wealth inequality, that disproportionately African Americans suffer a little more.

Some white Milwakeeans still referred to the North side as 'the cire', as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four hour daycares, and corner stores with 'WIC Accepted Here' signs.

When I first arrived in Los Angeles from New York in 2004 to try to break into television, I couldn't believe how segregated it was - how many neighborhoods were nearly all-white or all-black or -Asian or -Latino.