The Black Man Quotes

#1. No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise.

Marcus Garvey

#2. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.

Emma Goldman

#3. You have not been placed on this earth to be the sole source of comfort for the black man's fragile ego. Page 221

Deborrah Cooper

#4. The black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#5. The logic behind white domination is to prepare the black man for the subservient role in this country.

Steven Biko

#6. Seems like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.

Lorraine Hansberry

#7. Raw, naked truth exchanged between the black man and the white man is what a whole lot more of is needed in this country - to clear the air of the racial mirages, cliches, and lies that this country's very atmosphere has been filled with for four hundred years.

Alex Haley

#8. When and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law?

Benjamin Harrison

#9. Black Consciousness is in essence the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression.

Steve Biko

#10. I believe there's - now, don't get me wrong; I'm not prejudiced - there's some white people in this country who'll never accept the black man as a golfer. That's true.

Charlie Sifford

#11. America's most dangerous and threatening black man is the one who has been kept sealed up by the Northerner in the black ghettos - the Northern white power structure's system to keep talking democracy while keeping the black man out of sight somewhere, around the corner.

Malcolm X

#12. The political philosophy of black nationalism means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community; no more.

Malcolm X

#13. 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.

Malcolm X

#14. The Black Man grinned at her with his jackal mouth, and his scarlet eyes knew all the secrets of woman-blood.

Stephen King

#15. I am convinced that the Black man will only reach his full potential when he learns to draw upon the strengths and insights of the Black woman.

Manning Marable

#16. They asked if I knew what 'conscientious objector' meant. I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.

Malcolm X

#17. And in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody's guess which of the 'extremes' in approach to the black man's problems might personally meet a fatal catastrophe first - 'non-violent' Dr. King, or so-called 'violent' me.

Malcolm X

#18. The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

Emma Goldman

#19. The cornerstones of this country's operation are economic and political strength and power. The black man doesn't have the economic strength - and it will take time for him to build it. But right now the American black man has the political strength and power to change his destiny overnight.

Malcolm X

#20. In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#21. But in the earlier hours, or so I have read, they still have got their daylight minds. It takes the midnight mind to do the black deed to the black man.

Elizabeth Spencer

#22. The black man should seek to be, and he should be encouraged to be, the best possible black man and not the best possible imitation of a white man.

Warren G. Harding

#23. I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn't a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.

Jesse Owens

#24. Is there a war on cops? Is there a war on the Black man? Who is going to call a cease fire?

Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

#25. After all the black man has been through in this world, he can still often reach levels of spirituality the most pampered white man cannot touch. Maybe what he's been through is the reason why.

Ben Stein

#26. Because as a youngster I longed to see the Black man free and I longed to see anyone stand up for us.

Louis Farrakhan

#27. I always said if I lived to get grown and had a chance, I was going to try to get something for my mother and I was going to do something for the black man of the South if it would cost my life; I was determined to see that things were changed.

Fannie Lou Hamer

#28. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.

Barack Obama

#29. 'I Spy' represents the absence of the tension of the black man or black woman or anyone of that color walking in, so that the white racist person can become entertaining to a viewer.

Bill Cosby

#30. If no other consideration had convinced me of the value of the Christian life, the Christ like work which the Church of all denominations in America has done during the last 35 years for the elevation of the black man would have made me a Christian.

Booker T. Washington

#31. Why dost thou smile so at me?" inquired Hester, troubled at the expression of his eyes. "Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?"
"Not thy soul," he answered, with another smile. "No, not thine!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#32. The black man continues on his way. He plods wearily no longer-he is striding freedom road with the knowledge that if he hasn't got the world in a jug, at least he has the stopper in his hand.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

#33. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

Malcolm X

#34. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God's light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted - was able - only to unshape.

Stephen King

#35. It is the White Man who creates the black man. But it is the black man who creates.

Claudia Rankine

#36. The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences. He knew the course of the stars in the universe before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn't flat.

Malcolm X

#37. I've done movies for certain reasons; I did 'Anaconda' because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn't dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It's like, 'The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'

Ice Cube

#38. We're conditioned in this country to believe that if there's a problem, the black man is usually the culprit.

Wesley Snipes

#39. Though the white man is a kind of Satan, and though the black man is Satan for selling his own children into bondage and assassinating the image of his own mother, because he himself wants to be white'I can assure you that Africa has known no greater Satan than the twins, Arab and Islam.

Kola Boof

#40. See, the Black man gotta fly to get to something the white man can walk to.

Chris Rock

#41. Until the image of the black man in the mind of the black man has been changed, there will always be delinquency, parental and juvenile. The idea is not to change the attitude of the white man to the black man but to change the attitude of the black man to himself.

Malcolm X

#42. In all fields black consciousness seeks to talk to the black man in a language that is his own

Steven Biko

#43. Going to church will not get you the black man you seek and it never will. Page 98

Deborrah Cooper

#44. We must stand up and say, "I'm black and I'm beautiful," and this self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the white man's crimes against him.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#45. Memphis was almost like going to California. Beale Street was the black man's street.

Muddy Waters

#46. Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.

Frederick Douglass

#47. Why are they picking on boxing? It's because the black men are so superior in boxing that they want to stop it. Well, the black man's so hungry he's got to fight.

Muhammad Ali

#48. The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.

James A. Baldwin

#49. The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace.

James Baldwin

#50. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that we should be separate, all right, but in this separate state or separate existence, the black man should be given the opportunity and the incentive to do for himself what the white man has done for himself.

Malcolm X

#51. A war on cops? Then the question becomes who are they warring with? Because if you look at the prison system you can tell who the Prisoners of War are. The Black Man. Words are powerful and we must stop these divisive words that tare our country further apart instead of bringing us together.

Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

#52. A lot of people love their hate. They live to hate the people wronged them. You cain't just have one gang. That don't even make sense. If you took away the white man's black man or the black man's white man, most of 'em wouldn't even know how to walk down the street right.

Walter Mosley

#53. All I demand for the black man is, that the white people shall take their heels off his neck, and let him have a chance to rise by his own efforts.

William Wells Brown

#54. Let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote.

Warren G. Harding

#55. Me don't dip on nobody's side. Me don't dip on the black man's side, not the white man's side. Me dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

Bob Marley

#56. It is ironic that America, with its history of injustice to the poor, especially the black man and the Indian, prides itself on being a Christian nation.

James H. Cone

#57. It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively, he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree.

James Weldon Johnson

#58. We used to be "shiftless and lazy," now we're "fearsome and awesome." I think the black man should take pride in that.

James Earl Jones

#59. For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

Frantz Fanon

#60. I always root for the black man, like penance for something I had not part in creating.

J.M. August

#61. Part of the approach envisaged in bringing about Black Consciousness has to be directed to the past, to seek to rewrite the history of the black man and to produce in it the heroes who form the core of the African background

Steven Biko

#62. The time is past when Christians in America can take a long spoon and hand the gospel to the black man out the back door.

Mordecai Wyatt Johnson

#63. Accept your place in the sun as it was originally before the creation of this world ... The black man is the first and last, maker and owner of the universe.

Elijah Muhammad

#64. Abraham Lincoln freed the black man. In many ways, Dr. King freed the white man. How did he accomplish this tremendous feat? Where others - white and black - preached hatred, he taught the principles of love and nonviolence.

Ronald Reagan

#65. Women feel the humiliation of their petty distinctions of sex precisely as the black man feels those of color. It is no palliation of our wrongs to say that we are not socially ostracized, so long as we are politically ostracized as he is not.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#66. You know I'm not hung up on this liberating myself from the "black" man - I'm not going to try that thing.

Fannie Lou Hamer

#67. The black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.

Steven Biko

#68. Nobody should teach the black man in America to turn the other cheek, unless someone is teaching the white man in America to turn the other cheek.

Malcolm X

#69. The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

Frederick Douglass

#70. The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.

Steven Biko

#71. America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.

Malcolm X

#72. If the government can't get the black man justice, then it's time for the black man to get some justice for himself.

Malcolm X

#73. I admit that the black man is inferior. But what is it that makes him so? It is the ignorance in which white men compel him to live;

Harriet Jacobs

#74. Senator John Stennis:
The civil rights movement did more to free the white man that the black man ... It freed my soul.

Joe Biden

#75. How is the black man going to get 'civil rights' before he first wins his human rights?

Malcolm X

#76. Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man's book too, and that with mine own blood!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#77. I believe in freedom for everyone, not just the black man.

Bob Marley

#78. Many voted in 2008 with the desire to see racism and racists humiliated by having a qualified black man elected president.

Douglas Wilder

#79. I made up my mind that I was going to be just like Elvis. It never occurred to me that Elvis was a man. I just wanted to be him. He had a huge impact on me, right down to that black leather jumpsuit he wore on the '68 Comeback Special.

Suzi Quatro

#80. That night, as he bounded up the steps and out of the church basement, nobody in the room could have imagined that they had just seen the man who, a decade from now, would become the first black president of the United States. NEW

Isabel Wilkerson

#81. I feel that sometimes, holding yourself as black, saying that is your sole identity, can sometimes stand in your way of being a member of the humanity of man, being a member of the family of the divine.

Giancarlo Esposito

#82. in America the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking.

Yaa Gyasi

#83. Johnny Vassilaros is the man who has created the finest cup of coffee ever served in the city of New York.

Lewis Black

#84. Somehow, the Good Lord don't want to see no man start a cold morning with just black coffee.

Robert Newton Peck

#85. When I get home and people ask me,'Hey, Hoot, why do you do it, man? What are you? Some kind of war junkie? I won't say a goddamn word. Why? They won't understand. They won't understand why we do it. They won't understand that it's about the men next to you. And that's it. That's all it is.

Black Hawk

#86. Perhaps one day the man in the black jacket will think about this too: why he only wondered if it was Kevin or Amat who was telling the truth. Why Maya's word wasn't enough.

Fredrik Backman

#87. Once in a stately passion I cried with desperate grief
'Oh Lord, my heart is black with guile, of sinners I am chief'
Then stooped my guardian angel and whispered from behind
'Vanity my little man, you're nothing of the kind'

James Thomson

#88. His gaze met hers. It was crazy. Dressed down in worn blue jeans and a black shirt, he was the most beautiful man she'd ever seen.
And the moment was sort of perfect.
Even with the deer head staring over his shoulder like a total creeper.

J. Lynn

#89. Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating 'Lincoln the myth.' He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man's president.

Henry Louis Gates

#90. Who that man in the black Sedan
With two cheap hookers and a Mexican
Pumpin' white lines, sippin' warm Coors Light
Mickey Avalon, call me Mr. Right

Mickey Avalon

#91. Paco Montegrifo was the sort of man who decides, as soon as he's old enough to make such decisions, that black socks are strictly for chauffeurs and waiters and opts instead for socks of only the darkest navy blue.

Arturo Perez-Reverte

#92. I could give you my word as a Spaniard," Inigo said.
"No good," the man in black replied. "I've known too many Spaniards.

William Goldman

#93. Jesus was not white, hey, he was a black man. Like our pig man, Mzwaki. All the Bible people were dark people.

Jonah Becker

#94. As a black man, you run from the cops. It's different now, but back when I was coming up, you run.

Rodney King

#95. They told me I had been sick twelve days, lying like dead all the while, and that Whirlwind Chaser, who was Standing Bear's uncle and a medicine man, had brought me back to life.

Black Elk

#96. The man in black fled across the dessert and the gunslinger followed.

Stephen King

#97. Women are not equal with men, that's sure. When the woman is in danger she always looks to the man for help. We are superior by nature. The black or white woman needn't worry in life because the world is ruled by the white man.

Muhammad Ali

#98. Who are you? What do you want?" The black-clad man drew himself up arrogantly. "Once I was called Elan Morin Tedronai, but now - " "Betrayer of Hope.

Robert Jordan

#99. Please, all you MCs out there, all you fans out there, don't think Big gonna make a record dissing 2Pac or the West Coast because it's not going down like that. I cant even see me wasting my time or my talent to disrespect another black man.

The Notorious B.I.G.

#100. This man roared his part of the darkness, stifled her in shadows. He belonged in the black velvet of night and the mysterious twilight grays of evening.

Daisy Banks