55 quotes
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)
The position of women in the [civil-rights] movement is prone.
Revolutionary history shows that the People do not nurse their wounds. After defeat, they begin immediately planning the next step in the forward ever march.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
The first law of the universe is everything changes, all the time.
The time for running has come to an end. You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!
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)
Just political power comes only from the organized masses.
Authors make errors, history, does not!
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
If there is no intense struggle today, there will be no meaningful results tomorrow.
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)
The death of Che Guevara places a responsibility on all revolutionaries of the World to redouble their decision to fight on to the final defeat of Imperialism. That is why in essence Che Guevara is not dead, his ideas are with us.
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)
It is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents.
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)
In dialectics, we know everything contains positive and negative attributes. Reforms can be used to advance Revolution or to forestall Revolution. Dialectics inform us that when the negative dominates the positive in reform it becomes an obstacle on the road to freedom; it must give way to Revolution.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
Vietnam is clear, representing another of the tragedies of capitalism. Young men left the U.S.A., traveling 10,000 miles to a country they had never heard of before, actually believing they were sacrificing their lives to advance democracy, to advance history, when in fact they were fighting against themselves.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)