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It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.
So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.
Whatever I have done since then, I have driven myself to become a success at it. I’ve often thought that if Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged me to become a lawyer, I would today probably be among some city’s professional black bourgeoisie, sipping cocktails and palming myself off as a community spokesman for and leader of the suffering black masses, while my primary concern would be to grab a few more crumbs from the groaning board of the two-faced whites with whom they’re begging to “integrate.” All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn’t, I’d probably still be a
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We were in that world of Negroes who are both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.
All of us—who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries—were, instead, black victims of the white man’s American social system.
“Jumpsteady.” 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.
Most whites don’t give a Negro credit for having sense enough to fool them—or nerve enough.
Sometimes, recalling all of this, I don’t know, to tell the truth, how I am alive to tell it today. They say God takes care of fools and babies. I’ve so often thought that Allah was watching over me. Through all of this time of my life, I really was dead—mentally dead. I just didn’t know that I was.
I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.
Four hundred years of black blood and sweat invested here in America, and the white man still has the black man begging for what every immigrant fresh off the ship can take for granted the minute he walks down the gangplank.
this empire that’s today the richest of all nations—where
I wasn’t about to say any of that romance stuff that Hollywood and television had filled women’s heads with. If I was going to do something, I was going to do it directly. And anything I was going to do, I was going to do my way. And because I wanted to do it. Not because I saw somebody do it. Or read about it in a book. Or saw it in a moving picture somewhere.
He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don’t share his vainglorious self-opinion.
“You have sweated blood to help him build a country so rich that he can today afford to give away millions—even to his enemies!
That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about “white” men.
they were aware of the yardstick that I was using to measure everything—that to me the earth’s most explosive and pernicious evil is racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as One, especially in the Western world.
I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.
“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
We both agreed that American society makes it next to impossible for humans to meet in America and not be conscious of their color differences. And we both agreed that if racism could be removed, America could offer a society where rich and poor could truly live like human beings.
Yes, I have cherished my “demagogue” role. I know that societies often have killed the people who have helped to change those societies. And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America—then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.
