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The black people of America have been victims of violence at the hands of the white men for four hundred years, and following the ignorant Negro preachers, we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us.

Malcolm X

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Malcolm X
Age: 39 †
Born: 1925
Born: May 19
Died: 1965
Died: February 21
Autobiographer
Human Rights Activist
Muslim Minister
Political Activist
Politician
Omaha
Nebraska
Malcolm Little
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz
Malcolm Shabazz
Malachi Shabazz
Thought
Hundred
Cheek
America
Violence
Negro
Years
Turn
Cheeks
Men
Four
Preacher
Brutalizing
People
Turns
Victims
Preachers
White
Ignorant
Godlike
Black
Victim
Brute
Hands
Following
Brutes

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Only a man who is ashamed of what he is will marry out of his race.
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My family was so poor we were close to eating the holes inside of doughnuts.
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The American Negro has been entirely brainwashed from ever seeing or thinking of himself, as he should, as a part of the non-white peoples of the world.
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How can anyone be against love?
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To me, political action involves making the politician who represents us know that he either produces or he is out, and he's out one way or another.
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White individuals that have been going to jail. Segregation still exists discrimination still exists. A few isolated white people whose individual acts are designed to eliminate this, that or, or the next thing but, yet, it is never eliminated is in no way impressive to me.
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Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.
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I have gone through the process of re-evaluating, giving a personal re-evaluation to everything that I ever believed and that I did believe while I was a, a member and a minister.
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Anytime you tell a man to turn the other cheek or to be nonviolent in the face of a violent enemy, you're making that man defenseless. You're robbing him of his God-given right to defend himself.
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If integration will get [black man] that [respect as the human being], all right. If segregation will get him that, all right. If separation will get him that, all right.But after he gets integration and he still doesn't have this dignity and this recognition as a human being, then his problem is still not solved.
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That's not a chip on my shoulder, that's your foot on my neck.
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Now, you integration-minded Negroes are trying to force yourselves on your former slave master, trying to make him accept you in his drawing room you want to hang out with his women rather than the women of your own kind.
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You spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don't even know there's a human-rights tree on the same floor.
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I had one warden tell me since I've been out, and I visited an inmate in prison right here in New York, Warden Fay up at Green Haven. I visited an inmate in prison and he told me that he didn't want anybody in there trying to spread this religion.
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Daring to reach, to climb, to crawl, to scratch, to get back up when you've been knocked down, to push forward - ever forward - to forgive. It means sacrificing everything if necessary, to carve out a place for your own existence. It means living.
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I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.
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Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.
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You have to be very careful introducing the truth to the black man, who has never previously heard the truth about himself. The black brother is so brainwashed that he may reject the truth when he first hears it. You have to drop a little bit on him at a time, and wait a while to let that sink in before advancing to the next step
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We do not condemn the preachers as an individual but we condemn what they teach. We urge that the preachers teach the truth, to teach our people the one important guiding rule of conduct - unity of purpose.
Malcolm X