Community Quotes

We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

A minister cannot preach the glories of heaven while ignoring social conditions in his own community that cause men an earthly hell. I stressed that the Negro minister had particular freedom and independence to provide strong, firm leadership, and I asked how the Negro would ever gain freedom without his minister's guidance, support and inspiration.

Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you.

When you have mass unemployment in the Negro community, it's called a social problem; when you have mass unemployment in the white community, it's called a depression.

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest.

Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community.

Only through our adherence to nonviolence- which also means love in its strong and commanding sense -will the fear in the white community be mitigated.

Our needs are identical with labor's needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community.

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.

The facilities for advanced education must be evened out and multiplied. No one who can take advantage of a higher education should be denied this chance. You cannot conduct a modern community except with an adequate supply of persons upon whose education, whether humane, technical, or scientific, much time and money have been spent.

All great movements, every vigorous impulse that a community may feel, become perverted and distorted as time passes.

Man-power-and when I say that I intend of course woman-power-is at a pitch of intensity at the present time in this country which was never reached before, not even in the last war, and certainly not in this. I believe our man-power is not only fully extended, but applied on the whole to the best advantage. I have a feeling that the community in this Island is running at a very high level, with a good rhythm, and that if we can only keep our momentum-we cannot increase our pace-that very fact will enable us to outclass our enemies and possibly even our friends.

Either we stay at home and become pillars of the community or we go out and tour. We couldn't really find any communities that still needed pillars.

For the past several years, I have remained what others would consider underground. I did this in order to build a community of people, like-minded in their desire for freedom and the right to pursue their goals and lives without being manipulated and controlled by a media protected military industrial complex with a completely different agenda.

I'm a reflection of the community.

We shouldn't be angry and my raps that I'm rapping to my community shouldn't be filled with rage? They shouldn't be filled with the same atrocities that they gave to me? In the media, they don't talk about it. So in my raps, I have to talk about it.

Until it happened, I really did believe that no Black person would ever shoot me. I believed that I didn't have to fear my own community, You know, I was like I represent them. I'm their ambassador to the world, they will never do me wrong.