Son, Last Sunday the host of a popular news show ask me what it meant to loose my body.
So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all.
So there was love, and specifically the desire to give to someone who had given so much to me. But too there was a need to liberate myself from old models. I did not want a good woman behind me, besid...
Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the same police that all the D.C. poets had warned me of. They approached on both sides of the car, shining their flashing ligh...
Serious history was the West, and the West was white.
Nothing between us was ever planned--not even you. We were both 24 years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage pa...
My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue.
It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the method of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck...
If you’re black, you were born in jail, Malcolm said. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had to avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walking home from school, in my lack of c...
I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seekin...
I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself. The
I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago -- the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy...
I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned in curiosity. They were concerned in compliance... 60% of all black men who drop out of school end up in jail. This should disgrace our country,...
I had not been prepared for the simple charm of watching someone you love grow.
I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior—they certainly did not curb mine—but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness.
I didn’t always have things, but I had people—I always had people.
I could haveyou arrested! Which is tosay: I could take yourbody.
I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more.
Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the...
Hate gives identity.