Otis Moss III Quotes

Let's concede that we have decided to let our children grow up in two separate nations, and lead two separate kinds of lives. If, on the other hand, we have the courage to rise to this challenge to name what's happening within our inner-city schools, then we also need the courage to be activist and go out and fight like hell to change it.

We cannot reform institutional racism or systemic policies if we are not actively engaged. It's not enough to simply complain about injustice; the only way to prevent future injustice is to create the society we would like to see, one where we are all equal under the law.

If I wanted to fight to make a better world racially, I wouldn't be in the music business. You dig, if I were going to be a freedom fighter music is the wrong field.

A little old lady sitting at the front of the bus can do nothing to change civil rights.

My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.

Has he paid his dues? Is he black enough? John Lewis and I were out there marching and organizing sit-ins back in the '60s so that his children and my children would not have to do it. We would have been failures if had to do the same things we did.

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.

To feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the harborless without also trying to change the social order so that people can feed, clothe and shelter themselves is just to apply palliatives. It is to show a lack of faith in one’s fellows, their responsibilitie s as children of God, heirs of heaven.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

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.

His [Martin Luther King] last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, is a direct reference to angles, barbarism or socialism.

There is a magnificent new militancy within the Negro community all across this nation. And I welcome this as a marvelous development. The Negro of America is saying he's determined to be free and he is militant enough to stand up.

White privilege allows a certain kind of leisure that can be deployed by white people of advantage toward our restoration. That's all true and good. But it also suggests that there is an individual approach to the issues that many of these white people have taken up as a recognition of their tie to and responsibility for some of the inequities that exist. And I don't think it has to be an either-or. I think it has to be a bifocal approach.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

We need to create the institutions that will support the society we want to live in. The only answer is collective action.

I think that America could not become America until it dealt with the disenfranchisement of women and African Americans in the last century. It had to. America could not become America until it dealt with that. And did it deal with it perfectly? No. But it had to confront it.

I hope that young people especially will begin to have a better understanding of slavery and its effects, which are still evident today, to understand those parallels and, from there, begin ta be a part of the wave of hope to change things for the better.

But something stirred across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks were willing to march across a bridge. And so they [my parents] got together, Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama.

I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too small in quantity, but they are big in quality.

Dr. King didn't get famous giving a speech that said,"I have a complaint."

The film's title You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. comes from something I used to say in teaching my students "This is not going to be a neutral class." The world is already moving in certain directions and wars are going on and children are going hungry. Terrible things are happening. And so to be neutral in a situation like this is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I don't want to collaborate with the world as it is. I want to intrude myself. I want to participate in changing the direction of things. So that's the origin of the title.

Get informed. Get outraged. Get inspired. Get active.

There are so many things that we could do to change the world in so many aspects. There are people working in nonprofit organizations, tackling the issues that we so desperately need to face, while governments fail so appallingly.

Music can speak louder than words, and I will use my music to speak out on behalf of children everywhere.

When aroused the American conscience is a powerful force for reform.