“The day that the black man takes an uncompromising step and realizes that he’s within his rights, when his own freedom is being jeopardized, to use any means necessary to bring about his freedom or put a halt to that injustice, I don’t think he’ll be by himself.”

“Once I was, yes. But now I have turned my direction away from anything that’s racist.”

“I am not a racist. I am against every form of racism and segregation, every form of discrimination. I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.”

“It’s a struggle for every young Black man. You know how it is, only God can judge us.”

The muscular, athletic type is not representative of the human race, who are varied in their physique.

Because I lived in construction towns, we had a lot of workers who came from the South. They were all white, and, sorry to say, a number of them were pretty redneck.

I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.

“It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.” 

“If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.” 

“Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management. 

Who would thought only of themselves and kill their race? You would hate other people if you don't want to stay who you are.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.

“And I was angry because the media took racism seriously - or pretended to - but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.” 

The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.

A dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character;