Black Power Movement Quotes

During the 60's, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.

I was fascinated by the Black Panthers because I'd been in contact with the Nation of Islam, thanks to Muhammad Ali, and their way of talking was that the whites were the devil, and they'd get rid of them once they took over.

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

You can't be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters and not feel like you've got some kind of social responsibility.

A lot of people don't understand the Black Panthers Party's relationship with white mother country radicals.

I think Nina Simone has had an amazing journey. She was spicy and she had attitude and she didn't care, she wanted her money in a paper bag and don't mess with me and I've been doing some research on that so.

I was roommates with 2 of the guys who were influential in forming the Black Arts philosophy. I called them "goons," and [Amiri] Baraka took offense at that. But if you read his autobiography, the night we went up there for a fundraiser, he talks about how he wished that some violence would happen to us. How do you like Baraka as a gracious host?

[Lyndon ] Johnson was responding to a black freedom movement that was tearing the country open and he did what he had to do as a conservative politician.

The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in places like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on. So you have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality. All these things gave rise to the black power movement. The black power movement was not a separation from the civil rights movement, but a continuation of this whole process of democratization.

I think that N.W.A. picked up where Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King would have gone if they hadn't been assassinated.

Only time [JF] Kennedy made any, took any action to even look like he identified with negroes was when he was forced to. Kennedy didn't even make his speech based on this problem being a moral issue until Negroes exploded in Birmingham.

President Obama is a man who had certain advantages because of the civil rights movement. He had the opportunity to go to some of the best schools in this country - schools that train you how to run the political paradigm, not challenge it. The leaders of the Black Power Movement were challenging that paradigm.

Malcolm X was a man among men.

It's crazy; in the States, people think the black power movement drew inspiration from Africa. All these Americans come over here looking for awareness. They don't realize they're the ones who've got it over there.

My mom is a Pan-Africanist. My dad is still Orthodox Sunni Muslim, but he's super fun. He worked in television for years. He was a Black Panther.