I grew up watching those blaxploitation movies. Ron O'Neal Richard Roundtree Jim Brown Pam Grier. For the first time I saw 'The Negro' get one over on 'The Man.'

The battle was first waged over the right of the Negro to be classed as a human being with a soul later as to whether he had sufficient intellect to master even the rudiments of learning and today it is being fought out over his social recognition.

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.

But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we all our lives have treated the Negro as an inferior and God is there and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

The Negro people of America... have cut our forests tilled our fields built our railroads fought our battles and in all of their trials they have manifested a simple faith a grateful heart a cheerful spirit and an undivided loyalty .

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

The so-called modern education with all its defects however does others so much more good than it does the Negro because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.

This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto then must not be confined to matters of religion education and social uplift it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.

You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people for the rights of workers and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too.

If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.

The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

Negro banks as a rule have failed because the people taught that their own pioneers in business cannot function in this sphere withdrew their deposits.

The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people.