Justice & Law Quote by H. Rap Brown

A slap meant to wake up allies as much as antagonists: H. Rap Brown isn’t debating “law and order,” he’s detonating it. The line opens by scolding Black audiences who’ve internalized the state’s moral frame, repeating “law breakers” as if legality and justice naturally line up. Brown’s intent is corrective and confrontational: stop borrowing the language of the people who built the cage.

The subtext is historical and procedural. “We did not make the laws” points past individual prejudice to the architecture of American governance: legislatures, courts, police, and property rules designed in eras when Black people were excluded, enslaved, or formally segregated. Brown’s move is to sever the reflexive legitimacy we grant law. If the law is produced without you, and against you, why treat it as a moral contract? His phrasing “neither morally nor legally confined” is calculated provocation: morally, because unjust law has no ethical claim; legally, because the law’s authority is exposed as enforced power rather than consent.

The final sentence is the hinge: “Those laws that keep them up, keep us down.” It’s not abstract grievance; it’s a theory of social order in one beat. Law doesn’t merely punish wrongdoing, it organizes winners and losers, stabilizing hierarchy through zoning, schooling, employment, sentencing, surveillance. In the late-1960s context of urban uprisings and radical Black politics, Brown is also preempting liberal respectability politics: compliance won’t deliver liberation if the rules are rigged. The quote works because it refuses the comfort of neutrality and forces the listener to choose a side: legality or freedom, procedure or power.