"From my own point of view, the fact that the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could actthat way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded - at least, in the same way".
--> it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressuser of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro's past be used? The unprecedentd price demanded - and at this embattled hour of the world's history - is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars". (47-48)
"Yet I could have hoped that the Muslim movement had been able to inculcate in the demoralized Negro population a truer and more individual sense of its own worth, so that Negroes in the Northern ghettos could begin, in concrete terms, and at whatever price, to change their situation. But in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is: in the present case, to accept the fact, whatever one does with it thereafter, that the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam. The paradox - and a feraful pradox it is - is that American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same thing as drowning in it; -->