Black Patriotism

Read these profound and moving thoughts on black Patriotism, all from men and women who never once forgot their heritage.

A race without authority and power, is a race without respect.
Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

Above all things, the effort must result in making a man or woman think and do for himself or herself just as the Jews have done in spite of universal persecution.
Carter G. Woodson

African nationalism is meaningless, dangerous, anachronistic, if it is not, at the same time, pan-Africanism.
Julius K. Nyerere

All of us may not live to see the higher accomplishment of an African Empire?so strong and powerful, as to compel the respect of mankind, but we in our life-time can so work and act as to make the dream a possibility within another generation.
Marcus Garvey

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.
Martin Luther King, Jr

Any sane man, race or nation that desires freedom must first of all think in terms of blood. Why even the Heavenly Father tells us that "without the shedding of blood there can be no remission of sins." Then how in the name of God, with history before us, do we expect to redeem Africa without preparing ourselves?some of us to die.
Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy & Opinions of Marcus Garvey

As an artist I come to sing, but as a citizen, I will always speak for peace, and no one can silence me in this.
Paul Robeson

Bring on your tear gas, bring on your grenades, your new supplies of Mace, your state troopers and even your national guards. But let the record show we ain't going to be turned around.
Ralph Abernathy

Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear.
Paul Robeson, The Whole World In His Hands

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
Frederick Douglass, Civil Disobedience Manual

For no man should take me alive. I shall fight for my liberty and when the time comes for me to go, the Lord will let them kill me.
Harriet Tubman

For us to examine ourselves thoroughly as a people we will find that we have more traitors than leaders, because nearly everyone who essays to lead the race at this time does so by first establishing himself as the pet of some philanthropist of another race, to whom he will go and debase his race in the worst form, humiliate his own manhood, and thereby win the sympathy of the ?great benefactor?, who will dictate to him what he should do in leadership of the Negro race? These leaders tell us how good Mr. So and So is, how many good friends we have in the opposite race, and that if we leave everything to them all will work out well.
Marcus Garvey

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.
Huey Newton

I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.
Harriet Tubman

I have a great belief in the future of my people and my country.
Marian Anderson

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.
Zora Neale Hurston

I have the people behind me and the people are my strength.
Huey Newton

If our people are to fight their way up out of bondage we must arm them with the sword and the shield and the buckler of pride.
Mary McLeod Bethune

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the white man gives you anything -- just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves.
Fannie Lou Hamer

If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves. We should, therefore, protest openly everything ... that smacks of discrimination or slander.
Mary McLeod Bethune

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ?There lived a great people - a black people - who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization?.
Martin Luther King, Jr

It is a time for martyrs now, and if I am to be one, it will be for the cause of brotherhood. That's the only thing that can save this country.
Malcolm X

Lagging behind in the van of civilization will not prove our higher abilities. Being subservient to the will and caprice of progressive races will not prove anything superior in us. Being satisfied to drink of the dregs from the cup of human progress will not demonstrate our fitness as a people to exist alongside of others, but when of our own initiative we strike out to build industries, governments, and ultimately empires, then and only then will we as a race prove to our Creator and to man in general that we are fit to survive and capable of shaping our own destiny.
Marcus Garvey

Let us keep before us the fact that, almost without exception, every race or nation that has ever got upon its feet has done so through struggle and trial and persecution; and that out of this very resistance to wrong, out of the struggle against odds, they have gained strength, self-confidence, and experience which they could not have gained in any other way.
Booker T. Washington

My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?
Paul Robeson, http://homepage.sunrise.ch/homepage/comtex/rob3.ht

My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.
Harriet Ann Jacobs

No one knows when the hour of Africa's Redemption cometh. It is in the wind. It is coming. One day, like a storm, it will be here. When that day comes all Africa will stand together.
Marcus Garvey

The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.
Paul Robeson

The evolutionary scale that weights nations and races, balances alike for peoples; hence we feel sure that some day the balance will register a change for the Negro.
Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

The world ought to know that it could not keep 400,000,000 Negroes down forever.
Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.
Huey Newton

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.
Huey Newton

We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations, that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leadership, such social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves.
W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk

We must fight as a race for everything that makes for a better country and a better world. We are dreaming idiots and trusting fools to do anything less.
Ralph Bunche, Journal of Negro Education

What do I care about death in the cause of the redemption of Africa?...I could die anywhere in the cause of liberty: A real man dies but once; a coward dies a thousand times before his real death. So we want you to realize that life is not worth its salt except you can live it for some purpose. And the noblest purpose for which to live is the emancipation of a race and the emancipation of posterity.
Marcus Garvey

You white folks have long been eating the white meat of the chicken. We Negroes are now ready for some of the white meat instead of the dark meat.
Mary McLeod Bethune