H. Rap Brown Quotes

Thought the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resisted at every step of his progress.

If you asked me why I went to jail, the easiest explanation would be to say, 'Because I'm black.'

My only crime was being born black - or being born black in Alabama.

Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.

I look at racism as one of the social demons. And, in its worst, it's violent and it's a systemic commitment to oppression.

I think that one of the positions we have taken around the question of race, is that we already know. We know. We know. We know. And so we don't need to look at it again. And yet everybody is still upset. Everybody is still being driven by their outrageous imagination to the point of killing people because they feel that a black man in front of them is a demon, or the Incredible Hulk.

I am angry about the world's conditions for black people.

Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld.

I'm not trying to say that it never hurt or that I never felt its sting, but I can honestly say that I never blamed anybody for racism. I have considered it more of a manifestation of humanity's problem rather than my personal problem.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.

The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

Every institution where a number of the coloured races are, or can be drawn together, shall be broken up… If we destroy, or prevent the building of the nest, we shall not be liable to the incursions of the brood.

Abolish lynching

If you do away with segregation, allow negro [sic] children in white schools, churches, etc. you might as well drop a few bombs on us and not prolong the agony.

Our ears are saluted from the east and west, north and south alike saying: I like a Negro in his place. But there are no two communities which agree as to his proper place. So they have been trying to fix him in first one place and then in another; but just as soon as public sentiment changed, or he saw an opportunity, he changed to such places as he thought his intelligence, industry, courage and endurance commanded.

We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.

The Negro people, most exploited of the toilers, suffering from lynching and Jim Crowism, robbed of their constitutional rights, are being prepared to fight another war for 'democracy' in order to further enslave them.

You see people being lynched in public, while others take pictures of the scene. Mind you, this is the 21st century—not the French Revolution.

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

What whites cannot experience and may never understand is that no matter which side of the bed I chose to wake up on, I would still be a black man in the racially divisive America.