African American Empowerment Quotes

Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing. This time they were taking the initiative.

Prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could unify, and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.

The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-American.

Malcolm X's separatist ideas were situational. If you think about where African-Americans were in the 1940s and 1950s, we needed to step away because that force, which is still present but more subdued, was very in your face, and we needed to take a step back just to get some clarity.

LBJ’s policies were giving American blacks hope they’d never had, they found intolerable what they had once accepted as inevitable.

The black power movement was not a separation from the civil rights movement, but a continuation of this whole process of democratization.

Class concerns never lost their potency during the war. In 1864, as defeat loomed and the South’s leaders contemplated augmenting the army with slaves, some feared that the rebel nation would fall if deprived of its lowest layer. Black men would achieve a rise in status through military service, undermining general assumptions about the color-coded social hierarchy.

The political philosophy of black nationalism means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community; no more.

By arming the Negro we have added a powerful ally. They will make good soldiers.

There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.

I identify... with the ideas that Malcolm X stood for.

Ali helped raise black people in this country out of mental slavery. The entire experience of being black changed for millions of people because of Ali.

If as friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by any means succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery, and at the same time in restoring a captive people to their long lost fatherland with bright prospects for the future, and this too so gradually that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change, it will be a glorious consummation.”

I've just got a real thirst for knowledge now, especially seeing how the world is, seeing how the disparity is with African American men, and I want to do something special. And getting a degree from Duke is special, especially coming from where I come from.

If you look at the true essence of the Black Panthers, they were more of a community protection group.

Black power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their questions about it.

As Africans Americans we often think about the tragic stories associated with our lineage, but there are a lot of triumphs. Traveling helps you learn about other aspects of our history, like the story of Christ the Redeemer. It's empowering and inspiring.

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

Gangsta to me is the Black Panther Party.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

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.

If it hadn't been for that march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, there would be no Barack Obama as President of the United States of America.

It's no accident that most of the great black spokespersons and leaders understood the centrality of self-affirmation, self-respect and self-love.

And when the time is right, I hope that African Americans will again look to the party of emancipation, civil liberty, and individual freedom.