Black Leadership Quotes & Sayings

Black leadership has to recognize that principles more than speech, character more than a claim, is greater in advancing the cause of our liberation than what has transpired thus far. — Louis Farrakhan

Deception is nowhere more common than in religion. And the persons most easily and damningly deceived are the leaders. Those who deceive others are first themselves deceived, for not many, I think, begin with evil intent. The devil, after all, is a spiritual being. His usual mode of temptation is not an obvious evil but to an apparent good. The commonest forms of devil-inspired worship do not take place furtively at black masses with decapitated cats but flourish under the bright lights of acclaim and glory, in a swirl of organ music. — Eugene H. Peterson

The term 'black' was given a rebirth by the black youth revolt. As reborn, it does not refer to the particular color of any particular person, but to the attitude of pride and devotion to the race whose homeland from times immemorial was called 'The Land of the Blacks.' Almost overnight our youngsters made 'black' coequal with 'white' in respectability, and challenged the anti-black Negroes to decide on which side they stood. This was no problem for many who are light or even near-white in complexion, for they themselves were among the first to proclaim with pride, 'call me black!' Those who hate the term but hold the majority of leadership positions feel compelled to use it to protect their leadership roles. — Chancellor Williams

Recognize that being one of the only black people in an organization, or just in a meeting, automatically makes you very visible. Use this to help yourself. Look at it as an opportunity, and leverage that opportunity by making a visible contribution. — Kenneth I. Chenault

Starting with Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, by 1760, there had been eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments. There had also been six black rebellions, from South Carolina to New York, and forty riots of various origins. By this time also, there emerged, according to Jack Greene, "stable, coherent, effective and acknowledged local political and social elites." And by the 1760s, this local leadership saw the possibility of directing much of the rebellious energy against England and her local officials. It was not a conscious conspiracy, but an accumulation of tactical responses. — Howard Zinn

In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, Right, or Center, or whether they are peaceful, reform, violent, non-violent or laissez-faire. Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines. — Harold Cruse

Like if Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started being all bummed out about everything. How were we going to kick arse if our Leonardo was wearing a black eye-band instead of a blue one? — Dougie Poynter

Local white leadership was discredited in the eyes of black people, too, by their insistence on asking me, when we met to discuss the local events, usually with black people, if I had discovered who was the traveling black agitator who had come in and stirred up their "good black people." And had I discovered if there were any communists behind the disruptions? — John Howard Griffin

I'm tired of the naked, raped, beaten black woman body. I want to see an image of black femaleness that alters our universe in some way. — Bell Hooks

We've got to have a legacy of leadership. We've got to bring along with us a generation of black women who are going to confront twenty-first-century realities. — Jewell Jackson McCabe

None of this seems to affect the leadership, that people don't go out to vote, that they don't feel the need to go vote, that they already feel disenfranchised. It's not just Obama's fault or Clinton's or whomever's, it's all of them, the whole collection of clowns I've had to sit through. — Lewis Black

If this were a courageous country,
it would ask Gloria to lead it
since she is sane and funny and beautiful and smart
and the National Leaders we've always had
are not.
When I listen to her talk about women's rights
children's rights
men's rights
I think of the long line of Americans
who should have been president, but weren't.
Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth.
John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo.
Imagine President Martin Luther King confronting
the youthful "Oppie" Oppenheimer. Imagine President
Malcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President Stevie
Wonder dealing with the "Truly Needy."
Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, or
Sweet Honey in the Rock
dealing with Anything.
It is imagining to make us weep with frustration,
as we languish under real estate dealers, killers,
and bad actors. — Alice Walker

Black newspapers and their readers wasted no time in making the link between America's inadequacy in space and the dreadful conditions facing many black students in the South. "While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools," opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its "Mississippiitis" - that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption - the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership. An editorial in the Cleveland Call and Post — Margot Lee Shetterly

There's a very big gulf between the black civil rights leadership in America and the black middle class in America. The black middle class are conservative. Many of those minorities can be persuaded to be members of the Republican Party. — Pete Du Pont

If a group of people - leaders - can convince a group of folk who barely have a pot to piss in that the rich shouldn't be taxed
THAT is leadership! — Lewis Black

How does one undermine the framework of racial reasoning? By dismantling each pillar slowly and systematically. The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics, and to combat the black nationalist attempt to subordinate the issues and interests of black women by linking mature black self-love and self-respect to egalitarian relations within and outside black communities. The failure of nerve of black leadership is its refusal to undermine and dismantle the framework of racial reasoning. — Cornel West

Al Qaeda is not the organization now that it was before. It is under stress organizationally. Its leadership spends more time trying to figure out how to keep from getting caught than they do trying to launch operations. — Cofer Black

Africans and persons of African descent must assume the primary responsibility and leadership in historical research ... if we are to continue to leave practically all important historical research and writing concerning the black race to the white man, then we must be prepared to accept, uncomplainingly, the white man's point of view. — Chancellor Williams

I am proud to live in a country with an African-American president. But President Obama cannot be proud of the fact that the prevalence of black poverty has actually increased under his leadership, the specific policies advanced by the president and his allies on the left amount to little more than throwing money at the problem and walking away. — Rick Perry

[O]ur revolt was as much against the traditional black leadership structure as it was against segregation and discrimination. — John Lewis

We [black people] don't respect our elders. Besides artists, we don't respect Frederick Douglass. We don't respect Martin Luther King. You look at every Martin Luther King Boulevard out here, and it's a crack block. That's not because of white people. That's because of black leadership. We just have that problem, and it's something that I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to conquer. — KRS-One

I have this insane optimistic streak that the American people prevail over the stupidity that the leadership exhibits time and time again, and I think that's the truth. — Lewis Black

I think that the Vietnam War era is important because we tend not to want to revisit it. For black people, there was the temptation of disaffection. People looked for alternative ways to express themselves personally and politically, people doubted the system, and there was the terrible kind of division in black America between a radical leadership and a much older, compromising leadership. — Darryl Pinckney

Black women are going to have to take more leadership. I think we are prepared because we bring a tenaciousness with us. We do not fear losing friends, allies, or jobs. — Maxine Waters

Whatever success I have achieved, whatever positions of leadership I have held have depended less on Ivy League degrees or SAT scores or GPAs, and have instead been due to that sense of connection and empathy - the special obligation I felt, as a black man like you, to help those who need it most, people who didn't have the opportunities that I had - because there but for the grace of God, go I - I might have been in their shoes. I might have been in prison. I might have been unemployed. I might not have been able to support a family. And that motivates me. — Barack Obama

The modern church encourages African-American women to keep others' vineyards, while neglecting their own, in two ways: by venerating Black women's performance of strength and depending upon women's labor and financial support to maintain the church, without providing equal opportunity for Black women to exercise their gifts in ministerial leadership; and by distorting Scripture in a way that encourages suffering and self-sacrifice among Black women. — Chanequa Walker-Barnes

Judge Carter sat in stony silence, completely unmoved. At the end of the trial, he pronounced King guilty of conspiracy to violate the 1921 law and ordered him to pay a five-hundred-dollar fine or serve a year at hard labor. Like Judge Carter, the national newspaper and magazine reporters waiting outside for the ruling ignored the black women's testimonies that detailed decades of mistreatment and denied King's leadership in the boycott. Instead, the media turned King into an apostle of civil rights. — Danielle L. McGuire

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men. — Gloria Steinem

How long can we go without real leadership? It's like an experiment. It's [a problem with ] both parties, it's beyond belief. — Lewis Black

There is a man who exists as one of the most popular objects of leadership, legislation, and quasi-literature in the history of all men ... This man, that object of attention, attack, and vast activity, cannot make himself be heard, let alone understood. He has never been listened to ... That man is Black and alive in white America where the media of communication do not allow the delivery of his own voice, his own desires, his own rage. — June Jordan

The cattle raid, the creach, was not only a test of leadership and honor, celebrated in bardic song. It also paid a tidy profit, when the clan could charge ransom to return the stolen cattle. The term in Scots was blackmail - mail being the word for "rent" or "tribute," and black the typical color of the Highlander's cattle. Blackmail determined the rhythm of life in many parts of the Highlands. Some observers estimated that at any given moment the average chief had half his warriors out stealing his neighbor's cattle, and the other half out recovering the cattle his neighbors had stolen from him. — Arthur Herman

Nobody could have possibly known that the FBI had sent a phony letter to Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, 'signed' by the Panther 21, criticizing Huey Newton's leadership... no one could have known that the FBI's cointelpro was attempting to destroy the Black Panther Party in particular, and the Black Liberation movement in general, using divide-and-conquer tactics. — Assata Shakur

The liberal wing of the feminist movement may have improved the lives of its middle- and upper-class constituency
indeed, 1992 was the Year of the White Middle Class Woman
but since the leadership of this faction of the feminist movement has singled out black men as the meta-enemy of women, these women represent one of the most serious threats to black male well-being since the Klan. — Ishmael Reed

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today. — Angela Davis

You know, I've never believed, in anything, that you had to have role models who looked like you to do something. If I'd been waiting for a black, female, soviet specialist role model, I'd be still waiting. — Condoleezza Rice

How are things with you, sir?"
"Fine." He says it flat."Coffee black. BLT."
Now my heart tells me this guy needs more in life, so I take a short. "You ever had a cheese burger with grilled onions and mushrooms on pumpernickel, sir?"
That takes a minute to sink in.
Then he slaps the counter, grinning. "Bring it on."
I sense he needs more.
"You want a malt with that, by any chance?"
He did, of course. "Chocolate," he says, beaming like a kid.
Now he's loosening up.
It's a privilege to touch humanity in such a fashion. — Joan Bauer

We have two nations, and it's not black or white. It's red and blue. Under Republican leadership, cities tend to do better. Cities are destroyed under Democrats, because they don't know how to deal with the constituency; they're terrified. — Greg Gutfeld