Quotes about Oppression

There will be no permanent solution to the race problem until oppressed men develop the capacity to love their enemies. The darkness of racial injustice will be dispelled only by the light of forgiving love.

agree with the President's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders that our nation is splitting into two hostile societies and that the chief destructive cutting edge is white racism.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over...

An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

In country after country we see white men building empires on the sweat and suffering of colored people.

For more than a century of slavery and another century of segregation Negroes did not find mass unity nor could they mount mass actions. The American brand of servitude tore them apart and held them in paralyzed solitude.

In Mississippi the murder of civil rights workers is still a popular pastime. In that state more than forty Negroes and whites have either been lynched or murdered over the last three years, and not a single man has been punished for these crimes. More than fifty Negro churches have been burned or bombed in Mississippi in the last two years, yet the bombers still walk the streets

History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses rising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom in one majestic chorus

Freedom is not won by a passive acceptance of suffering. Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering.

He explains how all African Americans involved in our own liberation struggle came to embody the dignity of moral conviction and self-sacrifice. Importantly, he explains here how the way of nonviolence heals the oppressed as well as the oppressor.

Why does misery constantly haunt the Negro?