Quotes about Oppression

A thousand ways every day, the white man is telling you You can't live here, you can't enter here, you can't eat here, drink here, walk here, work here, you can't ride here, you can't play here, you can't study here. Haven't we seen enough to see that he has no plan to *unite* with you?

If you are born in America with a black skin, you're in prison

Under the pitiful misapprehension that it would make them better, these Hill Negroes were breaking their backs trying to imitate white people.

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound.

This is still one of the black man's big troubles today. So many of those so-called "upper class" Negroes are so busy trying to impress on the white man that they are "different from those others" that they can't see they are only helping the white man to keep his low opinion of all Negroes.

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 greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors--in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition!...It is a miracle that the the American black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught here in white man's heaven!

The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. and the I.R.S. all combined can't turn up a thing I got, beyond a car to drive and a seven-room house to live in.

Shorty felt about the war the same way I and most ghetto Negroes did: Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight.

Is it clear why I have said that the American white man's malignant superiority complex has done him more harm than an invading army?

You don't have to go behind bars to be in jail in this country. If you are born in this country with black skin you are already in jail, you are already confined, you are already watched over by a warden who poses as your mayor and poses as your governor and poses as your President.

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