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June 29, 2020 - January 22, 2021
By guilt or aversion, many of the most sympathetic whites retained a subliminal belief pairing Negroes with violence, such that even innocent beating victims were implicated to some degree in their fate.
still true.
“biracial army.”
“The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people,”
(“We come late, late we come, in the reconciling and repentant spirit,”
By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation. There are exceptions, of course. We salute those. But what political leader can stand up and say, “My party is the party of principles”? For the party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary
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More than his words, the timbre of his voice projected him across the racial divide and planted him as a new founding father.
“I’d like to blow the whole town up!”
Odd novelties of emotion burned through his daze, leaving senseless impressions of pain and balm. McNair was sure that some white people had just killed his daughter in church, but that same afternoon dignified, overwrought white strangers knocked at his door to express their condolences. Some of them arrived in cars bearing Confederate license plates.
Among civilian whites in general, reactions wound more softly in the same coil: a stab of sympathy and generalized remorse, followed quickly by resentment of exaggerated accusations and then a growing sense of innocence.
Among the mourners were eight hundred Birmingham pastors of both races, making them many times over the largest interracial gathering of clergy in the city’s history. They assembled on Wednesday, September 18, exactly three weeks after the March on Washington.
the face of Jesus was knocked cleanly from the only surviving stained-glass window in the east wall.
“the only time that nonviolence has been admired is when the Negroes practice it.”
“Nowhere in that Bible can you show me where Moses went to his people and said, believe in the same god that your slavemaster believes in, or seek integration with the slavemaster,” Malcolm said
Kennedy was largely absent from the racial deliberations of his presidency, the issue remained an exogenous factor to the most intimate, admiring accounts of his life.
The hidden spectacle was the more grotesque because King and Levison both in fact were the rarest heroes of freedom, but the undercover state persecution would have violated democratic principles even if they had been common thieves.
In this sense, Kennedy’s murder marked the arrival of the freedom surge, just as King’s own death four years hence marked its demise.
abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
1954 memorandum in which Attorney General Herbert Brownell effectively advised Hoover to disregard a unanimous Supreme Court decision outlawing such bugs.
* Though jarring by later standards, the word “black” was usually taken as an insult in the pivotal year of 1963. In Toledo, Ohio, high school students staged a mass protest after an assistant principal referred to them as “black students” over the intercom.
Shortly after delivering one of his most famous lectures, “The Romance of Death,” at Howard University, Johns himself dropped dead, in a sequence his admirers swore Johns had prearranged with God.
