During the next half-century or more, my race must continue passing through the severe American crucible. We are to be tested in our patience, our forbearance, our perseverance, our power to endure wrong, to withstand temptations, to economize, to acquire and use skill; our ability to compete, to succeed in commerce, to disregard the superficial for the real, the appearance for the substance, to be great and yet small, learned and yet simple, high and yet the servant of all. This, this is the passport to all that is best in the life of our Republic, and the Negro must possess it, or be debarred.

After four hundred years of slave labor, we have some back pay coming, a bill owed to us that must be collected.

To be a Negro in America is to hope against hope.

Not only does his Americanism compel the Negro to strive to improve his own status by demanding the rights that are his. It also gives him, as it gives to others committed to the ideals set forth in the American dream, a burning desire to make the system work.

Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation-we have fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer and warning have been given to this nation in blood brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this worth the striving? Would America have been America without her Negro People?

The destiny of the colored American ... is the destiny of America.

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow-sign. Not more water, the fire next time!

The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.

American civil rights leader, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Lynching is a murder. For the past four hundred years our people have been lynched physically, but now it's done politically. We're lynched politically, we're lynched economically, we're lynched socially, we're lynched in every way that you can imagine.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world-I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

The drums of Africa beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth.

You show me a black man who isn't an extremist and I'll show you one who needs psychiatric attention.

We're no longer arguing about riding on the back of the bus, but being the bus driver or the president of the bus company. We're not pushing for the right to buy the hot dog, but selling the hot dog and the right to own the hot dog franchise.

If you are black, the only roads into the mainland of American life are through subservience, cowardice, and loss of manhood. These are the white man's roads.

The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.