In a collective society, everybody's business is everybody's business.
All life is a test one way or the other.
We never see ourselves as heroes and sometimes when we do it is a hero that has made a fortune as a clown or a boxer. And there is no lasting value in either one of those.
What has been imposed on religion is not religion itself but the custom of those who have been converted to it. I think that the most atrocious of all of this is Islam. They were in the slave trade before Islam. The Arabs were natural slave traders. They were the people who were called on to conquer us, unfortunately.
When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with 'Georgia on My Mind.'
My daddy wanted me to be a farmer; feel the smoothness of Alabama clay and become one of the first blacks in my town to own land. But, I was worried about my history being caked with that southern clay, and I subscribed to a different kind of teaching and learning in my bones and in my spirit.
The difference between the Pyramids in Egypt and the ones in Mexico is there is nothing inside the Mexican Pyramids. In the African Pyramids, the whole inside is a burial chamber. So they were really gravesites to nobility.
If I lead the field in any way, it is in the area of curricula development, study guides and other teaching materials.
I am a nationalist, and a Pan-Africanist, first and foremost. I was well grounded in history before ever taking a history course. I did not spend much formal time in school - I had to work.
Some of us say, "Lord knows how much I can bear". I think you can assume that you can bear more than you have a right to bear.
The Arabs are deep in the slave trade right now.
You should not bear insults.
Attending church is one thing, belonging is another.
I believe in spirituality, which is out there.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.
I have walked majestically with kings and queens and presidents and other heads of states.
As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.
If God is love, then God has no stepchildren to love.
The southern white Baptists now want to integrate with the black Baptist church. I say that would be the end of it. In the first place, most white southern Baptists can't preach, their intentions are not that good and we make a different joyful noise unto the Lord than white people. When we say, "Lord Jesus, personal savior", we may not mean the same thing as what they mean.
I have gone up in the Pyramids and the stones are so close together you can't force a playing card between them and (they are) in perfect alignment. So those people must have had some hydraulics or something. You take 20 men, put them around a big stone, their legs would get in the way. Even if they could lift it, 20 pairs of legs hitting against each other would throw it off balance. And they would not have it in exact alignment. Not even a fraction of an inch off.
Whoever the Lord is, he'd give us a facility. He's given you hands, legs and might so you use that facility to rise above the lowly status. Failing that, he gave you two good legs, just run like hell.
Man's attitude towards the universe and his opinion of the universe predates the scientific probe of the universe.
There's such a craving to make Egypt white or Asian, people don't just even listen to you. When you explain why would anyone build anything as enduring as the Pyramids in Africa before they would build anything of that nature at home?
Clowns don't build institutions, nor do boxers.
There are some long silences in Scandinavian and some Japanese films, when the audience knows action is taking place, but the audience hears no action.
