Every minister worthy of the name has to walk the line between prophetic vision and spiritual sustenance, between telling people the comforting things they want to hear and challenging them with the d...
In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice...
It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty...
In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus.
Anyone intent on moral clarity might want to find another book and, in fact, might not want to go anywhere near the enduring chasm of race in the United States.
It baffles me that people think that obliterating the past will save them from its consequences, as if throwing away the empty cake plate would help you lose weight.
In politics, regards themselves as a moderate, because they know some other sumbitch who's twice as crazy as they are.
Unjust social orders do no fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor, though such appeals may be an important element; history teaches us that they fall because a large enough number...
Tobacco put food on our tables, steeples on our churches, stains on our fingers, spots on our lungs, and contradictions in our hearts.
Some things are worse than death,’ Wright told Brown. ‘If a man lives, he must still live with himself.’ 19
You read yourself full, you pray yourself hot, and then you turn yourself loose.
We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.
The Lord works through deeply flawed people, since He made so few of the other kind.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, Baldwin instructs, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.24
It was like watching a community you thought you knew reveal itself as something else.
Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive and probably won’t.30
These are the facts. But we are obliged to go beyond the facts of the lynching and grapple with its meaning. If we refuse to look beneath the surface, we can simply blame some Southern white peckerwoo...
In the South’s calculation it took only one drop of black blood to make a person black.
Thurgood Marshall arranged a meeting with agents of the New York office of the FBI in connection with his efforts to combat communist attempts to infiltrate the NAACP, as the FBI put it. The future U....
The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear about them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness.