Manchild in the Promised Land Quotes

“For where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“I never wanted to go, because there was so much out there in that street.
You might see somebody get cut or killed. I could go out in the street for an afternoon,
and I would see so much that, when I came in the house, I’d be talking and talking for what seemed like hours.
Dad would say, ‘Boy, why don’t you stop that lyin’? You know you didn’t see all that. You know you didn’t see anybody do all that.’
But I knew I had.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“The Muslim movement is a good thing. It’s good because these cats know they’re angry, and they’re letting everybody else know they’re angry. If they don’t do any more than let the nation know that there are black men in this country who are dangerously angry, then they’ve already served a purpose.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“The Muslims became a very influential force in Harlem. They would never have been able to take over, because they couldn’t acquire any political power. For one thing, many of their recruits had been in jail. Once a person goes to jail for a felony, he loses his voting rights.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“Look around you. What’s it taught Negroes to do? All this Christianity? Nothing, nothing that could benefit them. All it’s taught Negroes to do is bow their heads to Mr. Charlie, buy bleach creams, straighten their hair, buy a Cadillac car that they can’t afford, and follow some white Jesus to a mythical place called heaven.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“If there was anything to this white man’s religion, he wouldn’t be so damn wicked.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“Yeah, there’s a lot more to it. This whole religion is foreign to a black man. A black man’s got no business kneeling down and praying to some old crazy figurines and talking that old ‘Our Father,’ ‘Jesus,’ and that kind of business. This Christianity thing is the worst thing that ever happened to Negroes. If it wasn’t for Christianity, Negroes would have stopped praying a long time ago. They would’ve started raising a whole lot of hell. They would’ve known. There would’ve been thousands of Nat Turners and Denmark Veseys. But most of the Negroes were too damn busy looking up in the sky and praying to some blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus and some white God who nobody was suppose to ever see or know anything about.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“The black man’s got no business with Christianity. They’ve even got us looking up at some white Jesus. Jesus was black. It says so in the Bible. It says that Solomon was black; it says that Moses was black. But here they’ve told us a lie. They took the Bible and rewrote it for themselves, telling us that they were white so we’d be looking up to them for being white. If you look up to Jesus and Jesus was white, you got to look up to these white men because they’re white.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“Down home, when they went to town, all the niggers would just break bad, so it seemed. Everybody just seemed to let out all their hostility on everybody else.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“I’d tell her about rebellion, and she’d say, “Look, don’t be tellin’ me about no rebellions and all that kind of business. You might know some big words, but you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I know a whole lot of people go around using them old big words, and they don’t know a damn thing what it’s all about.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“I could sense the fear in Mama’s voice when I told her once that I wanted to be a psychologist. She said, “Boy, you better stop that dreamin’ and get all those crazy notions outta your head.” She was scared. She had the idea that colored people weren’t supposed to want anything like that. You were supposed to just want to work in fields or be happy to be a janitor. I remember something she told Pimp. I think she thought she was giving Pimp something that he needed, and she felt big about it. “Now if you just get a job as a janitor, I’ll be happy and satisfied,” she said. I jumped up when she said this, and I said, “Doesn’t it matter whether he’s satisfied or how he feels about it?” Mama and Dad looked at me as if in two minutes’ time I’d be ready for Bellevue, or maybe they’d better call right away. They’d always look at me and say, “You better stop talkin’ all that foolishness, boy. What’s wrong with you? You better get all that stuff out of your head.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“Tell me something, Billy. What happened to you, man? How did you get into this Muslim thing?” “I’m not a Muslim, man. Those people are a little mixed up.” When he said that, I sort of raised an eyebrow and thought, Well, damn, I thought one of those groups was bad enough around here, and now we got something else. Everybody’s going crazy in his own right. I said, “Well, what you into, man?” “Have you ever heard of the Coptic faith?”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“The cops down there were terrible, but we were living right near the Bowery, so we couldn’t expect but so much. They wouldn’t put any good cops down there—if there is such a thing as a good cop.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“Bud Powell,”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“There’s just something fascinating about religious chicks anyway. It’s the high potentiality for corruption that’s so fascinating.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“She had Carole going around to all those old sanctified churches and all that old crazy kind of stuff. The girl lost all the self-confidence she used to have.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“There was always a chance somebody would say, “Well, he died. The cat took an O.D.,” an overdose of heroin; or he was pushed out of a window trying to rob somebody’s apartment, or shot five times trying to stick up a place to get some money for drugs. Drugs were killing just about everybody off in one way or another. It had taken over the neighborhood, the entire community. I didn’t know of one family in Harlem with three or more kids between the ages of fourteen and nineteen in which at least one of them wasn’t on drugs. This was just how it was.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“Mary McLeod Bethune.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“When I first came up there, I had to go to school for half a day. They put me in a class, and there was a faggot in the class. The cat was about a year older than I was, a real nice-looking guy. As a matter of fact, he was so handsome, I guess it would have been hard for him not to be a faggot.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“And some of the faggots up there were pretty good with their hands. As a matter of fact, some of them were so good with their hands, they had the man they wanted just because he couldn’t beat them.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“when this guy had gotten shot in the Polo Grounds, they started looking in all the houses on Edgecombe Avenue, and that’s where he lived. They started looking for guns and stuff. They had a house-to-house search for guns. And they found a .22 rifle in his house. The man had been shot with a .45, but they blamed it on him.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“Horse was a new thing, not only in our neighborhood but in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and everyplace I went, uptown and downtown. It was like horse had just taken over. Everybody was talking about it. All the hip people were using it and snorting it and getting this new high.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“I wasn’t listening to what he was saying either. I just wanted to get back to Wiltwyck and steal something and get into a lot of trouble. I never wanted to go back to anyplace so bad in all my life. I wanted to be around K.B. and Horse and Tito and other cats like me. We could all get together up at Wiltwyck, raise a lot of hell, and show people that we weren’t pigs and that we couldn’t be fucked over but so much. Simms and Claiborne and Nick and Papanek and everybody else up at Wiltwyck knew I was somebody—even when I wasn’t getting into trouble. I couldn’t wait to get back to where I wasn’t a pig.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land

“Reno was somebody from the streets. I think he took to me because he saw me as somebody from the streets, somebody who hated to see the sun go down on Eighth Avenue, who would run up on Amsterdam Avenue, follow the sun down the hill, across Broadway, to the Drive and the Hudson River, and then would wait for the sun to come back. I guess Reno thought he'd found somebody who was destined to be in the streets of Harlem for the rest of his life.”
― Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land