After the first difficulties in Rochester, New York, I was asked to consult with community leaders. I went and spoke for quite a long time. The leaders were concerned and sincere men. The first questi...
I spent years, he told me, studying the phenomenon of love.And I spend years studying the phenomenon of justice.At base, we spend years studying the same thing.
To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.
You can't get around what's right, though, he said. When we stop loving them, that's when they win.
The same principle held in black universities, where students demanded more and more black teachers. White professors who had virtually dedicated their lives and their academic careers as historians,...
Yes, and then it’s these things that cause the whites to say we’re not worthy of first-class citizenship. Ah … He dropped his hands to his sides hard in frustration. Isn’t it so? They make it impossib...
We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.
This system of discrimination, an inculcated double standard, may vary in content from culture to culture, but it is always unjust. There are thousands of kinds of injustice but there is only one kind...
The delusion lies in the fact that no matter how well we think we know the Other, we still judge from within the imprisoning framework of our own limited cultural criteria, we still speak within the c...
It was the ghetto. I had seen them before from the high altitude of one who could look down and pity. Now I belonged here and the view was different. A first glance told it all. Here it was pennies an...
We've reached a poor state when people are afraid that doing the decent and right thing is going to help the communist conspiracy.
But part of that incipient racism had always led whites to assume the leadership positions and perpetuated the view that whites rather than blacks were the heroes of the movement.
We need a conversion of morals, the elderly man said. Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint-some enlightened common sense. Otherwise, we'll never have the ri...
He who is less than just is less than man.
He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.
He told me how all of the white men in the region craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. And I guarantee you, I’ve had it in every one of them bef...
What fragmented individualism really meant was what happened to a black man who tried to make it in this society: in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man - dress white, talk white...
A couple of years ago I was seated in an auditorium in Detroit where Reverend Cleage was explaining to a conference of priests that what they called black separatists were in reality men who recognize...
The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecut...
Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. Y...