Francis J. Grimke Quotes

Certain it is that the Negro soldiers are not fighting and dying to maintain the status quo for their race. Their place now is in the front of the bullets of the enemy, and below the bombs in enemy planes. Bullets, or threats of bullets, are not likely to cause them to bow and scrape once they are home.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

I always said if I lived to get grown and had a chance, I was going to try to get something for my mother and I was going to do something for the black man of the South if it would cost my life; I was determined to see that things were changed.

If the Negro is to achieve the goal of integration, he must organize himself into a militant and nonviolent mass movement.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours.

At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.

The day for the Negro man being a coward is over.

I think that we've got to come to see this. The Negro is an American.

If the black man is feeble and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve,and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization; for the sake of that element, no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him: he will survive and play his part. So now, the arrival in the world of such men as Toussaint, and the Haytian heroes, or of the leaders of their race in Barbadoes and Jamaica, outweighs in good omen all the English and American humanity.

Martin Luther King would celebrate the symbolic status (of having a black president), but he would examine what the real substance was. And if he saw that poor and working people were not at the center of public policy, he would be deeply, deeply upset.

If I had to choose between baseball’s Hall of Fame and first class citizenship for all of my people. I would say first-class citizenship.

There are many white people in this country who realize that the system itself - as it is constructed - is not so constructed that it can produce freedom and equality for the negro, and the system has to be changed.

We're primarily interested in solving the problem of 20 million black people. And if integration is going to solve the problem tomorrow, then let's integrate. But since the Supreme Court issued its desegregation decision seven years ago, and you only have about six or seven percent integration now, on an educational level, that means that the black man trying to use integration as a means of solving his problem will be another 100 years just getting integration on an educational level.

We blacks had problems in the '60s and we solved them by marching. We've still got problems - let's march.

Nobody black or white who really believes in democracy can stand aside now; everybody's got to stand up and be counted.

Malcolm X never renounced and never stepped away from a strong commitment to black nationalism and black self-determination. That's absolutely clear if you do any analysis of his speeches.

The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.

We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as free humans in this society.

The whole fabric of southern society must be changed, and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never be, as it never has been, a true republic.

Lincoln has accepted America as a biracial society. He's talking about giving at least some black men the right to vote. In the Emancipation Proclamation he advises some blacks to labor faithfully for reasonable wages, here in the United States. He doesn't say anything about them leaving the country. He puts black men in the army. That is a whole different vision than simply saying "let's have them go out of the country." I think what's interesting is the change in Lincoln's view, but one must realize that he did adhere to this idea of colonization for many years.

The Civil Rights Movement also reaffirmed me as a singer. It taught me that singing was not entertainment, it was something else.

When the students in the South, the blacks, started demonstrating, that was the beginning of the time of students becoming a social force around the world.