Black Leadership Quotes

Barack Obama is an educated fool. He is viewed as the white man in blackface in the community.

Barack Obama is a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.

As black Americans continue to be insulted and dismissed by protected white liberals, the Black Talented Tenth will continue to benefit from political donations, speaking engagements, national media presence, accolades as the official black leaders, and perpetual gigs on MSNBC and CNN.

There's a very big gulf between the black civil rights leadership in America and the black middle class in America. The black middle class are conservative. Many of those minorities can be persuaded to be members of the Republican Party.

I don't think that the United States are ready for a presidency as the one of Obama, at least because he would be the first black president.

I refer to a negro politician as a negro who is selected by Negroes and who is backed by Negroes.

[James] Baldwin said the real question is not when there will be the first Negro president in this country. The important question is what country he's going to be the president of.

There's already been black presidents who've been corrupt, so it doesn't strike me that having a black man in office means he's going to be the Messiah.

I'm not saying that President Obama should be exempt from criticism, nor do I believe it is some act of racial treason for a black person to hold our president accountable for his actions.

Normally, 'black responsibility' is a forbidden phrase for a black leader -- not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites.

I just voted for Jesse Jackson !

Aspiring black leaders are often asked to transcend race, even though no one ever asked, say, Hillary Clinton to transcend gender. This is a precarious race straddle that most members of the breakthrough generation seem to reject. Even the most well meaning white Obama supporters seem to take deep satisfaction in this idea. Obama, they insisted, could be raceless, a reasurringly optimistic view of America's deepest burden that ignores countless peices of evidence to the contrary.

I think there's a lot of the hip-hop crowd behind Barack Obama because he's a black man. Honestly, I'm rooting for Hillary because race is only going to go so far. All the presidents are men at the end of the day.

Black leadership has to recognize that principles more than speech, character more than a claim, is greater in advancing the cause of our liberation than what has transpired thus far.

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

Question: Does it frost Jackson, Jesse Jackson, that someone like Obama, who fits the stereotype blacks once labeled as an Oreo -- a black on the outside, a white on the inside -- that an Oreo should be the beneficiary of the long civil rights struggle which Jesse Jackson spent his lifetime fighting for?

In interviews with dozens of black advisers, friends, donors and allies, few said they had ever heard Mr. Obama muse on the experience of being the first black president of the United States, a role in which every day he renders what was once extraordinary almost ordinary.

We Blacks have never had a President; we’ve only had preachers.

Just black executives have a bias against older artists. We don't respect our elders. That's not because of white people. That's because of black leadership. We just have that problem, and it's something that I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to conquer.

Our next black president, I think, can be more like Muhammad Ali.

We, the Black masses, don't want these leaders who seek our support coming to us representing a certain political party. They must come to us today as Black Leaders representing the welfare of Black people. We won't follow any leader today who comes on the basis of political party. Both parties (Democrat and Republican) are controlled by the same people who have abused our rights, and who have deceived us with false promises every time an election rolls around.

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

Black men - one might be the president. Well, America's in too much trouble - I don't want that job now.

I am not prejudiced against the Negro. When I was governor, I did more to help the Negroes in our State than any previous Governor, and I think you can find Negro leaders in the State who will attest to this fact.

If Barack Obama now, or some black person in the future, should become president, neither Jesse Jackson nor Al Sharpton would be out of a job. A black president can't end black misery; a black president can't be a civil rights leader or primarily a crusader for racial justice.