41 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)
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)
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)
Authors make errors, history, does not!
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)
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)
Black Power means that black people see themselves as part of a new force, sometimes called the “Third World”; that we see our struggle as closely related to liberation struggles around the world. We must hook up with these struggles.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
Before one begins to talk coalition, one should establish clearly the premises on which that coalition will be based. All parties to the coalition must perceive a mutually beneficial goal based on the conception of each party of his own self-interest. One party must not blindly assume that what is good for one is automatically—without question—good for the other.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
We say, “If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.” We must precisely state that what we repeat is not history but our errors under ever-changing material conditions. History does not repeat itself; it cannot. Nothing can. The first law of the universe is everything changes, all the time. Only those who see history as events and not as a process can make this error.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
Imperialism, trying to preserve itself in the face of the oppressed masses’ anticolonial struggle, presented neocolonialism to the masses. Neocolonialism means powerless visibility. You see an African president, but the entire country is controlled by France or Belgium or England—its former colonial master.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
Reorientation means an emphasis on the dignity of man, not on the sanctity of property. It means the creation of a society where human misery and poverty are repugnant to that society, not an indication of laziness or lack of The creation of new values means the establishment of a society based, as Killens expresses it in Black Man’s Burden, on “free people,” not “free enterprise”. To do this means to modernize—indeed, to civilize—this country.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
There can be no doubt that in today’s world a thorough and comprehensive education is an absolute necessity. Yet it is obvious from the data that a not even minimum education is being received in most ghetto schools. White decision-makers have been running those schools with injustice, indifference and inadequacy for too long; the result has been an educationally crippled black child turned out onto the labor market equipped to do little more than stand in welfare lines to receive his miserable dole.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)
There is a terminology and ethos peculiar to the black community of which black people are beginning to be no longer ashamed. Black communities are the only large segments of this society where people refer to each other as brother—soul-brother, soul-sister. Some people may look upon this as ersatz, as make-believe, but it is not that. It is real. It is a growing sense of community. It is a growing realization that black Americans have a common bond not only among themselves, but with their African brothers.
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967)