Elijah Muhammad Quotes

Black Power is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.

Negroes are destined to be the most revolutionary class in America

In the hands of the Negro teacher rests the destiny of the race.

To the Negro People of the World, Greeting: We hereby beg to inform you that acting under instructions from the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League of the World, an international convention of Negroes, representing every country in the world, was called, and said convention was held in New York, United States of America, in sitting from the 1st to the 31st of August, 1920. The purpose of the convention was to elect world leaders for the Negro people of the world. After several weeks of discussion and probing into the merits of the most able representatives of the race, the convention elected the following dignitaries as leaders of the Negro people of the world …. The time has come for the race to establish centralized authority in the control of its own affairs.

My number one priority is to save the Black man.

Universal Negro Improvement Association

We must canonize our own saints, create our own martyrs … black men and women who have made their distinct contributions to our racial history.

Where is the black man's Government? Where is his King and his Kingdom? Where is his President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared, "I will help to make them.

Black power means Black dignity

Our duty is to fight! Then we can adjust the problems that remain in the life of the colored man.

A Black man should be more independent and depend on himself for his freedom and not to take it for granted that someone would lead him to it. The blacks are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that they should be playing. They want to do things for themselves and all by themselves.

The efforts of governments alone will never be enough. In the end, the people must choose and the people must help themselves.

A lot of my work concerns a crisis of agency - what can we do?

We need to take responsibility and educate people. That's why black folks don't like me. I always say it's our responsibility to make safe neighborhoods. It's our job to get them cleaned up.

Everything that I'm attempting to do is based on my understanding of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and what he wanted for his people.

More people, especially young people, are realising that if they want change, they've got to go about it themselves - they can't depend on a particular person, i.e. me, to do all the work. They are less easy to fool than they used to be, they now know what's going on all over the world.

Governmental intervention and personal responsibility are not mutually exclusive issues, but they do frame a 'do it ourselves' vs. 'what are you doing for us' debate. For the black community, that's a debate that's been raging at least as far back as the W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington philosophical grudge matches.

The average Nigerian person has come to reconcile himself with the fact that his or her social progress remain essentially in his or her hands in collaboration with other fellow Nigerians and not merely relying on what government alone could provide for him or her.

Before, Indian people had been so defeated, they were always looking for outsiders, for the government, to somehow come in and fix things. But now, they seem to realize that they're the only ones who can save themselves.

American Negroes understand, far better than Soviet propagandists, that in the American system lies the hope for all submerged people who have the ability and determination to rise to the full status of free men.

I don't think that the country is ever ready to have the conversation about race.

These young people have to know that Dr. King and others made it possible for them to do their Hip Hopping.

White society will not listen to preaching. They will not listen to their liberals. Liberalism has not grown within white society, and we blacks cannot stand idly by watching the situation. We can only generate a response from white society when we, as blacks, speak with a black voice and say what we want. Now has come the time when we, as blacks, must articulate what we want, and put it across to the white man, and from a position of strength.

The respective classes of inhabitants began to feel that they had equal rights, and as the coloured population so far exceeded the white, the safety of the latter was threatened.

I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It had to serve as the center of the community’s political, economic and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities