The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, a...
If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.
And it is no surprise that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant would assume they could murder Emmett Till without
The murder of Emmett Till was reported in one of the very first banner headlines of the civil rights era and launched the national coalition that fueled the modern civil rights movement.
Some things are worse than death... If a man lives, he must still live with himself.
When we blame those who brought about the brutal murder of Emmett Till, we have to count President Eisenhower, who did not consider the national honor at stake when white Southerners prevented African...
What the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don’t understand is how deeply the past holds the future in its grip—even, and perhaps especially, when it remains unacknowledged.
We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why...
The ruthless attack inflicted injuries almost certain to be fatal. They reveal a breathtaking level of savagery, a brutality that cannot be explained without considering rabid homicidal intent or a ra...
Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, Baldwin instructs, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
What others might dismiss as the vagaries of fate, my father interpreted as dancing lessons from the Divine.
What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?
We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy.
There was at least one way that Chicago was actually more segregated than Mississippi. A demographic map of the city in 1950 shows twenty-one distinct ethnic neighborhoods: German, Irish, Swedish, Nor...
The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam’s and Bryant’s acquittals: The real horror comes when your dead brain must face th...
South where I grew up. In large measure, this reflected a racial and gender caste system that denied most other opportunities to African American women. That system was designed to ensure a ready supp...
Mamie now envisioned God’s purpose for her life—and for her son’s life: I took the privacy of my own grief and turned it into a public issue, a political issue, one which set in motion the dynamic for...
It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi, the NAACP declared in a 1947 petition to the United Nations. The petition, which decried the denial of human rights to minorit...
I knew that I could talk for the rest of my life about what happened to my baby, I could explain it in great detail, I could describe what I saw laid out there on that slab at A. A. Rayner’s place, on...