You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself. And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.

I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.

All my life, I have maintained that the people of the world can learn to live together in peace if they are not brought up in prejudice.

I ran away from St. Louis, and then I ran away from the United States, because of that terror of discrimination.

Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.