Quotes About Oppression

Now then, you have the masses of black people in this country who are the offshoot of the field Negro, during slavery. They are the masses. They are the ones who are jobless. They are the last hired and the first fired.

I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters—Plymouth Rock landed on us!

Revolutions are fought to get control of land, to remove the absentee landlord and gain control of the land and the institutions that flow from that land.

It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism.

In the ghettoes the white man has built for us, he has forced us not to aspire to greater things, but to view everyday living as survival-and in that kind of a community, survival is what is respected.

How can the white American government figure on selling "democracy" and "brotherhood" to non-white peoples—if they read and hear every day what's going on right here in America, and see the better-than-a-thousand-words photographs of the American white man denying "democracy" and "brotherhood

I could tell the impact of this upon them. They had been aware that the plight of the black man in America was bad, but they had not been aware that it was inhuman, that it was psychological castration.

Mr. Muhammad sent me a typed reply. It had an all but electrical effect upon me to see the signature of the "Messenger of Allah." After he welcomed me into the "true knowledge," he gave me something to think about. The black prisoner, he said, symbolized white society's crime of keeping black men oppressed and deprived and ignorant, and unable to get decent jobs, turning them into criminals.

Here was one of the white man's most characteristic behavior patterns—where black men are concerned. He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don't share his vainglorious self-opinion. In America for centuries it had been just fine as long as the victimized, brutalized and exploited black people had been grinning and begging and "Yessa, Massa" and Uncle Tomming. But now, things were different.

Our slave foreparents would have been put to death for advocating so-called 'integration' with the white man. Now when Mr. Muhammad speaks of 'separation,' the white man calls us 'hate-teachers' and 'fascists'!

For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped , or the wolf asking the sheep , 'Do you hate me?' The white man is in no moral position to accuse anyone else of hate! "Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I'm snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching?

Do you know why the white man really hates you? It's because every time he sees your face, he sees a mirror of his crime—and his guilty conscience can't bear to face it!

If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading.

That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I'm glad to be free of them.

I feel that if white people were attacked by Negroes—if the forces of law prove unable, or inadequate, or reluctant to protect those whites from those Negroes—then those white people should protect and defend themselves from those Negroes, using arms if necessary. And I feel that when the law fails to protect Negroes from whites' attack, then those Negroes should use arms, if necessary, to defend themselves.

the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world's non-white man.

Human history's greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil white man went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children, who were worked and beaten and tortured as slaves.

Indeed, how can white society atone for enslaving, for raping, for unmanning, for otherwise brutalizing millions of human beings, for centuries? What atonement would the God of Justice demand for the robbery of the black people's labor, their lives, their true identities, their culture, their history--and even their human dignity?

I would become so choked up that sometimes I would walk in the streets until late into the night. Sometimes I would speak to no one for hours, thinking to myself about what the white man had done to our poor people here in America.

We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation and social degradation. All of 'em from the same enemy. The government has failed us. You can't deny that. Any time you're living in the 20th century, 1964, and you walking around here singing We Shall Overcome, the government has failed you. This is part of what's wrong with you, you do too much singing. Today it's time to stop singing and start swinging.

He contended that if the leaders of the established civil rights organizations persisted, the social struggle would end in bloodshed because he was certain the white man would never concede full integration.

And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat or a Republican, nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy – all we've seen is hypocrisy.

He told me that all whites knew they were devils—"especially Masons.