“The Russians had done more than in­vade Czechoslovakia — they had sent their damn tanks crashing into our skulls, they had invaded the hopes of socialists all over the world.”

“The cops dropped me in the street and disappeared. My face, and my press card, were covered with blood. I went to the hospital to get five stitches in my forehead. So I missed the climax of the Yip-In, but I can pass on various accounts of witnesses”

“The 1968 Civil Disorders Bill had been pushed through Congress by Southern reactionaries who were convinced that there was a combined black power-communist conspiracy to burn down the American cities. Now it had actually been applied”

“The Movement in Amite County is pure and religious, uncontaminated by organizational in-fighting and hy­per-militancy. It is just two soli­tary organizers and a handful of local Negroes.”

“There were rabbis, junkies, schoolboys, actors, sharecroppers, intellectuals, maids, novelists, folk-singers, and politicians — 40,000 motives and 40,0000 people marching to Montgomery”

In 1989, Kathleen Cleaver remembered the life of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton

“The rebels arrived, in an uneasy coalition of hip, black, and leftist militants. They wanted to make Columbia more like home. So they ransacked files, shoved furniture around, plastered walls with paint and placards”

The day was full of TV cam­eras, spontaneous singing, speeches, clapping, and the echo of Martin Luther King’s phrase: “I have a dream … ”

“Just look at all the T-shirts, the buttons, the photographs, the records, the film and video appearances. Malcolm is to­day's black hero, a black ideal for turbulent times: the steely mirror image we want our­selves to see.”

“Historical events as vast as the overthrow of world communism can be analyzed on a cosmic scale, the way astronomers study the universe by peering at whole galaxies. Or they can be analyzed in miniature, by focusing on a molecule”