Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News, predicted, If a decision is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on th...
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.
The so-called war on drugs successfully targets young African American men, even though blacks and whites use and sell illicit drugs at roughly the same rate.
That we not become prejudiced against those are prejudiced, or whose prejudices. May no be our own.
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...
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...
Chicago activist Saul Alinsky sardonically defined integration as the period of time between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white.
Seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend. In Letter from a...
We want to transcend our history without actually confronting it. We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here.
We must look at the facts squarely, not to flounder in a bitter nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise rooted in the living ingredients of our own history.
Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.5
Racism was an important moral issue, one that the church needed to confront. Putting a black man in a position of honor and authority was a good thing, and if there was controversy over it, that was n...
Oxford was as drenched in Dixie as we were, just about as Southern a town as you would ever hope to find, which generally was a good thing, because that meant that the weather was nice, except when it...
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.13
Emmett did not have to go to Mississippi to learn that white folks could take offense even at the presence of a black child, let alone one who violated local customs.
A local white bootlegger, idling under the store awning, accosted Major Stem. Why’d you call that damned nigger woman ‘Mrs. Shaw’? he demanded. In those days, white Southerners did not use courtesy ti...
The lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend.
When we said we were going to do something directly, which is pronounced dreckly, we meant that we were going to get to it sooner or later, one of these days, maybe never, and please don't ask again.
So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court bu...