Aberjhani Quotes

My parents grew up during the Harlem renaissance.

Hip-hop was born of people who did not have a voice. They were not heard. And those people exist and are a part of a framework of life... as long as that's true, people will gravitate to hip-hop.

When Tupac came out, my writing changed for sure. I learned from it. It was a cultural thing.

Harlem's streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as 'This Was Harlem.'

People have suggested that perhaps we are too affluent to be telling this story, which is amazing to me because then I wonder what story I am allowed to tell. Having been working with the homeless for the past years, I noticed lots of things about them, but one thing I really noticed was that they were probably too busy just getting though the day to make a film about themselves.

The sad and tragic fact is that the civil rights movement, despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years degenerated into a demagogic hustle, promoting the mindless racism they once fought against.

Does that mean that all vestiges of past discrimination would be eliminated, that the income gap or the wealth gap or the education gap [between Afro-Americans and white] would be erased in five years or 10 years? Probably not, and so this is obviously a discussion we've had before when you talk about something like reparations.

As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.

In The Black Power Mixtape , you hear the voice of Angela Davis - not someone playing Angela Davis.

Precisely that, covering 500 years of African-American history in six hours. I've been working on this for seven years. The biggest challenge was deciding which stories to tell.

[Rosa Louise] Parks used to say, "Everybody looks at me because I sat down once in Montgomery, but the real hero is a woman named Septima Clark."She created the Citizenship Schools [where civil-rights activists taught basic literacy and political education classes].

You reached your level, you don't want any more. We asked ten years ago, we were askin' with the Panthers, we were askin' in the Civil Rights Movement. Now those who were askin' are all dead or in jail, wo what are we gonna do? And we shouldn't be angry!?

This unprecedented racism, bigotry and proto-fascist agenda that Donald Trump is trying to shove down America's throat has unleashed the resistance that will dethrone him.

I was reading the paper and saw a cartoon with Ray Kelly frisking Obama, and I was like "Wait, what's happening?" so I Googled it. For everything Obama stands for and the things he's said in the past in his books, especially with the Trayvon Martin thing - and I'm not sure if he [made his comments on Trayvon] because he was asked a question and he was trying to be diplomatic and neutral - that can't happen.

Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was - 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within - internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing.

This white man who is saying "it takes time." For three hundred and more years they have had "time," and now it is time for them to listen.

I think, especially among the New York intelligentsia at that time, that there was a reason Bob Dylan went to New York to happen, because there was a culture developed there around the ideas of civil rights, around the idea of democracy growing out of Emerson and Thoreau, these ideas of the fanfare for the common man.

Well, what Cory Booker and John Lewis are right about is to talk about the racist past of Donald Trump.

When Malcolm X was assassinated I was working at the Apollo. They brought his body to the Unity Funeral Home, which was around the corner.

Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction - in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years.

It was easy to get a job at the Cedar Bar because people came and went, but I didn't like the atmosphere. Instead, I got a job at Cooper Union Library. I stayed at Cooper Union for seven years; it was my salvation. While I worked there, I also read books of every kind.

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

Mankind's greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.

The beads around my neck [at Olympics in 1968] indicated that there were so many Blacks throughout the history of this country that have been maimed and killed by way of hangings.

The Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of "practice" events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to. Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure--but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary "tools," etc.