More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 29 - July 29, 2020
the Negro must face the fact that America is now his home, a home that he helped to build through “blood, sweat and tears.”
Furthermore, it is dangerous to organize a movement around self-defense.
But power and morality must go together, implementing, fulfilling and ennobling each other.
You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They
in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity….
But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers.
means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The American Negro will be living tomorrow with the very people against whom he is struggling today.
Are we seeking power for power’s sake? Or are we seeking to make the world and our nation better places to live.
Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
With every ounce of our energy we must continue to rid our nation of the incubus of racial injustice.
So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her.
Yet even amid these electrifying expressions of the rights of man, racism—the myth of inferior peoples—was flourishing here to contradict and qualify the democratic ideal.
its enlargement was tolerated in the interests of strengthening the nation.
“The stones of your houses are cemented with the blood of African slaves.”
Virtually all of the Founding Fathers of our nation, even those who rose to the heights of the presidency, those whom we cherish as our authentic heroes, were so enmeshed in the ethos of slavery and white supremacy that not one ever emerged with a clear, unambiguous stand on Negro rights. No
Yet in his heart Jefferson knew that slavery was wrong and that it degraded the white man’s mind and soul.
he soon found that it left the Negro with only abstract freedom.
What greater injustice could society perpetrate?
she evinced no motherly concern or love for her exiles from Africa. It
capacities are declared to be worthless to society. The Negro is no longer ashamed that he is black—he should never have permitted himself to accept the absurd concept that white is more virtuous than black, but he was crushed by the propaganda that superiority had a pale countenance.
beings. Edmund Burke said on one occasion: “When evil men combine, good men must unite.”
The white liberal must affirm that absolute justice for the Negro simply means, in the Aristotelian sense, that the Negro must have “his due.”
But this is a day which demands new thinking and the reevaluation of old concepts.
It is important for the liberal to see that the oppressed person who agitates for his rights is not the creator of tension.
Our marches merely brought them to the surface.
A great number of Negro ghettos were formerly Jewish neighborhoods; some storekeepers and landlords remained as population changes occurred.
The white liberal must honestly ask himself why he supported the movement in the first place.
The unpardonable sin, thought the poet Milton, was when a man so repeatedly said, “Evil, be thou my good,” so consistently lived a lie, that he lost the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.
Our Judeo-Christian tradition refers to this inherent dignity of man in the Biblical term “the image of God.” “The image of God” is universally shared in equal portions by all men.
There is no graded scale of essential worth. Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator.
The church has an opportunity and a duty to lift up its voice like a trumpet and declare unto the people the immorality of segregation.
and that every act of injustice mars and defaces the image of God in man.
The church must take the lead in social reform. It must move out into the arena of life and do battle for the sanctity of religious commitments.
And it must lead men along the path of true integration, something the law cannot do.
Such obligations are met by one’s commitment to an inner law, a law written on the heart.
These dark and demonic responses will be removed only as men are possessed by the invisible inner law which etches on their hearts the conviction that all men are brothers and that love is mankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation.
The Negro’s agony diminishes the white man, and the Negro’s salvation enlarges the white man.
True altruism is more than the capacity to pity; it is the capacity to empathize.
Other immigrant groups came to America with language and economic handicaps, but not with the stigma of color. Above all, no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil, and no other group has had its family structure deliberately torn apart. This is the rub.
Pettigrew has pointed out that American slavery is distinguished from all other forms of slavery because it consciously dehumanized the Negro. In
But even more incalculable was the psychological damage.
Against this ghastly background the Negro family began life in the United States.
but a tiny glimpse of the reality of the era,
Hence a matriarchy had early developed.
not for conquest but only to be allowed to live as humans.
Our children and our families are maimed a little every day of our lives. If we can end an incessant torture by a single climactic confrontation, the risks are acceptable.
Moreover, our family life will be born anew if we fight together.
But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. Their television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society.
Consumer items range from five to twelve cents higher in the ghetto stores than in the suburban stores, both run by the same supermarket chains;
