My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things.

The man who buried Malcolm X - my Muslim imam, priest - he, after I got beat up by police... came to me, and he said, 'You don't need this American name.' And I was susceptible to it at the time because, God knows, I had just gotten whipped near to death. So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat.

I met Malcolm the month before he was killed. He deeply changed my mind about America.

Amiri Baraka Quotes