The principle on which one had to operate was that the government which can force me to pay my taxes and force me to fight in its defense anywhere in the world does not have the authority to say that it cannot protect my right to vote or my right to earn a living or my right to live anywhere I choose

-- James Baldwin

Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco–is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function

-- James Baldwin

The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect. the white policeman...finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world. he is not prepared for it--naturally, nobody is--and, what is possibly much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white ppl are, to the anguish of the black ppl around him....

-- James Baldwin

one day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. before the dust has settled or the blood is congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. what happened is that negroes want to be treated like [humans]

-- James Baldwin

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They haven't even begun to pull the knife out. They won't even admit that the knife is there.

-- Malcolm X

We live surrounded by white images, and white in this world is synonymous with the good, light, beauty, success, so that, despite ourselves sometimes, we run after that whiteness and deny our darkness, which has been made into the symbol of all that is evil and inferior.

-- Paule Marshall

For me, white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.

- Peggy McIntosh