26 quotes
“The law” became a convenient tool to be used by illegal masters when black people sought to move.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
The social effects of colonialism are to degrade and to dehumanize the subjected black man.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
The time is long overdue for the black community to redefine itself, set forth new values and goals, and organize around them.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
Those of us who survive must indeed be a tough people.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
There can be no social order without social justice.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
What the master giveth, the master can take away.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
The black people should create rather than imitate—create new forms which are politically inclusive rather than imitate old racist forms which are politically exclusive.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
The two major political parties in this country have become non-viable entities for the legitimate representation of the real needs of masses—especially blacks—in this country.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
To black Africans, the word “Uhuru” means “freedom,” but they had to fight the white colonizers for the right to use the term.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
This country is known by its cities: those amazing aggregations of people and housing, offices and factories, which constitute the heart of our civilization, the nerve center of our collective being.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
The basic story of education in Central Harlem emerges as one of inefficiency, inferiority and mass deterioration. It is a system which typifies colonialism and the colonist’s attitude.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
Lowndes was a truly totalitarian society—the epitome of the tight, insulated police state.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
Political relations are based on self-interest: benefits to be gained and losses to be avoided. For the most part, man’s politics is determined by his evaluation of material good and evil. Politics results from a conflict of interests, not of consciences.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
Law is the agent of those in political power; it is the product of those powerful enough to define right and wrong and to have that definition legitimized by “law.” This is not to say that “might makes right,” but it is to say that Might makes Law.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
This country, with its pervasive institutional racism, has itself created socially undesirable conditions; it merely perpetuates those conditions when it lays the blame on people who, through whatever means at their disposal, seek to strike out at the conditions.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
Programs do not come out of the minds of any one person or two people such as ourselves, but out of day-to-day work, out of interaction between organizers and the communities in which they work.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
Racist assumptions of white superiority have been so deeply engrained into the fiber of the society that they infuse the entire functioning of the national subconscious. They are taken for granted and frequently not even recognized.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
Black people have not suffered as individuals but as members of a group; therefore, their liberation lies in group action. This is why SNCC—and the concept of Black Power—affirms that helping individual black people to solve their problems on an individual basis does little to alleviate the mass of black people.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
If political institutions do not meet the needs of the people, if the people finally believe that those institutions do not express their own values, then those institutions must be discarded. It is wasteful and inefficient, not to mention unjust, to continue imposing old forms and ways of doing things on a people who no longer view those forms and ways as functional.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
No, the call for Black Power in the 1960’s was not a call for racial isolation. Yes, it was an honest recognition that for any group—racial, ethnic, economic—to become a respected, effective player in the American political system, cohesive organization was crucial.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)