If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.
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.
And it is no surprise that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant would assume they could murder Emmett Till without
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...
Some things are worse than death... If a man lives, he must still live with himself.
Ernest Withers
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...
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 world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain…
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.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, Baldwin instructs, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
He held his ground like a sweet gum stump trying hard to live in a spirit of love and action, not anger and reaction
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.
What others might dismiss as the vagaries of fate, my father interpreted as dancing lessons from the Divine.
We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy.
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...
Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.
What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?
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...