I have the people behind me and the people are my strength. |
If you stop struggling, then you stop life. |
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community. |
The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life. |
There's no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively -- I am one with the people. |
There will be no prison which can hold our movement down...
The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards
can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people. |
You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution. |
Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny. |
Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it's off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves. |
I think what motivates people is not great hate,
but great love for other people. |
The imperialistic or capitalistic system occupies areas.
It occupies Vietnam now. They occupy them by sending soldiers there, by sending policeman there.
The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand.
They make the racist secure in his racism.
The gun in the establishment's hand makes the establishment secure in its exploitation. |
I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images. |
Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up. |
We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism.
We must destroy both racism and capitalism. |
Before 1776 America was a British colony. The British Government had certain laws and rules that the colonized Americans rejected as not being in their best interests. In spite of the British conviction that Americans had no right to establish their own laws to promote the general welfare of the people living here in America, the colonized immigrant felt he had no choice but to raise the gun to defend his welfare. Simultaneously he made certain laws to ensure his protection from external and internal aggressions, from other governments, and his own agencies. One such form of protection was the Declaration of Independence, which states: '... whenever any government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.' Now these same colonized White people, these bondsmen, paupers, and thieves deny the colonized Black man not only the right to abolish this oppressive system, but to even speak of abolishing it. |
Off the Pigs! |
I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life.
Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat.
It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness. |
The revolution has always been in the hands of the young.
The young always inherit the revolution. |
We felt that the police needed a label, a label other than that fear image that they carried in the community. So we used the pig as the rather low-lifed animal in order to identify the police. And it worked. |
We were trying to increase the conflict that was already happening... we felt that we would take the conflict to so high a level that some change had to come. |
