We are beautiful, imaginative and gifted people, and we owe it to ourselves and to our future generations to restore, to recreate this beauty. We must begin building cultural centers where we can enjoy being free, open and black, where we can find out how talented we really are, where we can be what we were born to be, and not what we were brainwashed to be.

We Can Be What We Were Born to Be. New York Times (July 7, 1968)