Zitat des Tages von Amiri Baraka:
If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.
My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things.
The man who buried Malcolm X - my Muslim imam, priest - he, after I got beat up by police... came to me, and he said, 'You don't need this American name.' And I was susceptible to it at the time because, God knows, I had just gotten whipped near to death. So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat.
I was Everett LeRoi Jones. My grandfather's name was Everett.
Spike Lee is part of a retrograde movement in this country.
Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction, and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness.
A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
There is other disturbing facts surround the hideous 911 attacks, which my family and I could see from the third floor bathroom window of our homes!
This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.
The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely. That's how I see it. Otherwise, I don't know why you do it.
As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is.
You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.
There will be, and should be, reams and reams of analysis, even praise, for our friend but also even larger measures of non-analysis and, certainly, condemnation for James Baldwin, the Negro writer.
A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.
We should understand the impact that Malcolm had on the whole of American society.
Mao Zedong was a revolutionary. He made a revolution.
I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.
