Quotes About Equality

Color is not a human or a personal trait; it is a political reality.

In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation—if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women.

America could have used in other ways the energy that both groups have expended in this conflict. America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color.

I was icily determined—more determined, really, than I then knew—never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my place in this republic.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes—I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether—is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed. People

We cannot be free until they are free.

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

All doormen, for example, and policemen have by now, for me, become the exactly same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I'm guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That

All doormen, for example, and policemen have by now, for me, become exactly the same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I'm guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms.

The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it.

America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color. But it has not dated to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity.

Él no era el negro de nadie. Y eso es un crimen en este país de mierda que, según dicen, es libre. Aquí, uno tiene que ser el negro de alguien.

In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation—if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create one nation has proven to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create tow, one black and one white.

There is absolutely no reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.

The fear that I heard in my father's voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.

White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded. White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.

is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them.

The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.

I just decided me one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew, and I was going to get to know it better than them, so could no white son-of-a-bitch nowhere never talk me down, and never make me feel like I was dirt, when I could read him the alphabet, back, from, and sideways. Shit-he weren't going to beat my ass, then. And if he tried to kill me. I'd take him with me, I swear to my mother I would.

There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.