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...
The world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain…
And it is no surprise that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant would assume they could murder Emmett Till without
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...
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.
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.
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.
We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy.
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.
What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?
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 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...
Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.
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...
What others might dismiss as the vagaries of fate, my father interpreted as dancing lessons from the Divine.
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...