Quotes -Benjamin Mays – Asa Phillip Randolph

Benjamin E. Mays
He who starts behind in the great race of life must forever remain behind or run faster than the
man in front.
I make bold to assert that it took more courage for Martin Luther King, Jr. to practice nonviolence than it took his assassin to fire the fatal shot.

Willie Mays
Robinson was important to all blacks. To make it into the majors and to take all the name calling,
he had to be something special. He had to take all this for years, not just for Jackie Robinson,
but for the nation.
I was very fortunate to play sports. All the anger in me went out. I had to do what I had to do. If
you stay angry all the time, then you really don’t have a good life.

Hattie McDaniel
Faith is the black persons federal reserve system.
(On accepting stereotypical black roles) What do you want me to do? Play a glamour girl and sit
on Clark Gable’s knee? When you ask me not to play the parts, what have you got in return?

Claude McKay
It’s when you’re down, you learn about your faults.
Negroes are like trees; they wear all colors naturally.
I know the dark delight of being strange, the penalty of difference in a crowd, the loneliness of
wisdom among fools.

Kelly Miller
The Negro pays for what he wants and begs for what he needs.
Circumstances not only alter causes; they alter character.
When reform becomes impossible, revolution becomes imperative.
Advantage and opportunity confer obligation

Ann Moody
Before Emmitt Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there
was anew fear known to me- the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst
of my fears.

Toni Morrison
If you can’t count, they can cheat you. If you can’t read, they can beat you.
The reclamation of racial beauty in the sixties…. Was not a reaction to self-mocking, humorous
critique of cultural/racial foibles common to all groups, but against the damaging internalization
of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze.
It is not because one is black that prejudice exists. The prejudice exists because one can
identify the person who was once a slave or in a lower class, and the caste system can survive
longer. In Nazi Germany, they found a way to identify the Jews by putting a label on them to
indicate who they were…..but here you have people who are black.
Black people’s grace has been what they do with language.
Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.

“Jelly Roll” Morton
I invented jazz in 1902.
Get up from that piano….you’re hurtin’ its feelings.
My grandmother told me that devil music would surely bring my downfall, but I just couldn’t put
it behind me.

Elijah Muhammad
Not one of us will have to raise a sword. Not one gun we need to fire. The great cannon will be
fired in our unity.
Discard your former slave masters’ names and be willing and ready to accept one of Allah’s
Pure and Righteous Names that He alone will give our people from His Own Mouth! A good
name is, indeed, better than gold.

Gloria Naylor
I am alive because of the blood of proud people who never scraped or begged or apologized
for what they were. They lived asking only one thing of this world- to be allowed to be. And I
learned through the blood of these people that black isn’t beautiful and it isn’t ugly-black is.
I got nothing but you’re welcome to all of that.

Larry Neal
America is the world’s greatest jailor, and we are all in jails. Black spirits contained like
magnificent birds of wonder.
The black Holy Ghost roaring into some shack of a church, in the South, seizing the
congregation with an ancient energy and power- the black church, therefore, represents and
embodies the transplanted African memory.

William C. Nell
Our brethren at the South should not be called slaves, but prisoners of war.
The treatment of the colored man in this country is a legitimate illustration of “hating those who
we have injured.”

Huey P. Newton
I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.
The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.
You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.

Eleanor Holmes Norton
The country would go bankrupt in a day if the Supreme Court suddenly ordered the powers that-be to pay back wages to children of slaves and to women who’ve worked all their lives for half wages or no pay.
Men without jobs do not form families.
There are not many males, black or white, who wish to get involved with a woman who’s
committed to her own development.
Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of
the black middle class.

Shaquille O’Neal
I don’t believe I have personally have been changed by the money….. The bad thing is people
“assume” you’ve changed because now you have money.
I realize I am a role model….The best thing for me and other athletes is to stay out of trouble.

Barrack Hussein Obama
What Washington needs is adult supervision.
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition.
I’ve got two daughters. Nine years old and six years old. I am going to teach them first of all
about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.
Americans …. Still believe in America where anything’s possible- they just don’t think their
leaders do.
(On America) It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of
immigrants setting out for distant shores… the hope of a skinny kid that America has a place for
him, too. The audacity of hope!

Jesse Owens
You see black is beautiful. White is beautiful. Skin-deep is never beautiful.
In theory, the Emancipation Proclamation had been a wonderful thing. But in 1915 in Alabama, it
was only a theory. The Negro had been set free to work eighteen hours a day, see to all his
labor add up to a debt at the year’s end, free to be chained to the land he tilled, but could never
own any more than if he was still a slave.
After the Olympics I came back to my native country, and I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus. I
had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted.
One chance is all you need.
Any black who strives to achieve in this country should think in terms of not only himself but also
how he can reach down and grab another black child and pull him to the top of the mountain.

Leroy “Satchel” Paige
How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was.
Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s
watching.
Ain’t no man can avoid being average, but there ain’t no reason a man got to be common.

Charlie Parker
Any musician who says he is playing better either on marijuana, the needle, or when he’s juiced,
is a plain straighht liar. You can iss the most important years of your life, the years of possible
creation.
Don’t play the saxophone, let it play you.

Gordon Parks
Until my mid-teens I lived in fear: fear of being shot, lynched ort beaten to death- and nor for any
wrongdoing of my own: I vcould easily been the victim of mistaken identidy or an act of terror by
hate-filled men.
Growing up in Kansas I was called nigger, black boy, darkey, shine and all the other named that
arouse anger and humiliation.. I was stoned and beaten. The indignities came so often that I
soon began to accept them as normal. But I have always fought back. In retrospect, I consider
myself lucky to be alive….I also consider myself lucky that I didn’t kill someone.

Rosa Parks
( on her refusal to give up her seat) When I made that decision, I knew had the strength of my
ancestors with me.
My mother believed in freedom and equality, even though we didn’t know it for reality during our
life in Alabama.
People always say I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired
physically, and no more tired than I usually was at the end of the working day. I was not old,
although some people have an image of me being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I
was, was tired of giving in.

Floyd Patterson
It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself.
They said that I was a fighter that got knocked down the most, but I also got up the most.
When you have a million dollars, you have a million friends.
The fighter loses more than his pride in the fight; he loses part of his future. He’s a step closer to
the slum he came from.

Ann Petry
The men stood around and the women worked. The men left the women and the women kept
right on working, and the kids were left alone. Always alone. They wouldn’t stay in the house
after school because they were afraid in the empty, silent, dark rooms….. And the street
reached out and sucked them up.
Streets like 116th street in Harlem or being colored, or a combintio nof both with all that it
implied, had turned Pop into a sly old man who drank too much; had killed Mom off when she
was in her prime.

William Pickens
The runaway Negro was the vanguard, the first hero in the struggle to free the race.
Those who quote providence are almost always without exception the Negros most active enemy.
The very advantage of a democracy make disenfranchisement therein the worst of enemies.

Sidney Portier
As a man, I’ve been representative of the values I hold dear. And the values I hold dear are
carryovers from the lives of my parents.
Mine was an easy ride compared to Jackie Robinson.
The call me “Mister” Tibbs.

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
No one can say that Christianity has failed. It has never been tried.
A man’s respect for the law and order exists in precise relationship to the size of his paycheck.
There is no future for a people who deny their past.
Mix a conviction with a man and something happens.
Keep the faith, baby!

Colin Powell
Let racism be a problem for someone else….. Let it drag them down. Don’t use it as an excuse
for your own shortcomings.
There are no more major civil rights to be passed. What we are dealing with now is changing of
hearts, changing of perspective and of minds.

Leotyne Price
All token blacks have the same experience. I have been pointed at as a solution of things that
have not yet begun to be solved, because pointing at us token blacks eases the conscience of
millions.
If you’re going to be black, think positive about it. Don’t think down on it, or think it’s something
in your way, And this way, when you really want to stretch out, and express how beautiful black
is, everybody will hear you.

Richard Pryor
I’ll never forget going to Harlem and seeing all those black people. Jesus, just knowing there
was that many of us made me feel better.
When you ain’t got no money, you gotta get an attitude.
I’m getting paid to make an ass of myself, what’s your excuse.

Robert Purvis
This is the red mans’ country by natural right, and the black man’s by virtue of his suffering toil.
To make me believe that the men who regulate education in our country have humanity in their
hearts is to make me believe a lie.

Asa Philip Randolph
The regnant law of life of political parties, like all other organizations, is self-preservation. They
behave in obedience to the priciple of “ the greates gain for the least effort.”
Salvation for a race, nation, or class must come from within. Freedom is never granted; it is
won. Justice is given given; it is exacted.