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The moment a situation became so that it exacted something of him, he rebelled.
“I’m Irish, you know,” she said. “My folks in the old country feel about England like the colored folks feel about this country. So I know something about colored people.
As long as he and his black folks did not go beyond certain limits, there was no need to fear that white force. But whether they feared it or not, each and every day of their lives they lived with it; even when words did not sound its name, they acknowledged its reality. As long as they lived here in this prescribed corner of the city, they paid mute tribute to it.
He was living, truly and deeply, no matter what others might think, looking at him with their blind eyes.
An Irish police captain remarked with deep conviction: “I’m convinced that death is the only cure for the likes of him.”
The word had become flesh.
“What do you want me to do?” Mr. Dalton asked coldly. “Do you want me to die and atone for a suffering I never caused? I’m not responsible for the state of this world. I’m doing all one man can.
He would not mind dying now if he could only find out what this meant, what he was in relation to all the others that lived, and the earth upon which he stood.
Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life.
What is happening here today is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life.
“The men who own those buildings are afraid. They want to keep what they own, even if it makes others suffer. In order to keep it, they push men down in the mud and tell them that they are beasts.
The job in getting people to fight and have faith is in making them believe in what life has made them feel, making them feel that their feelings are as good as those of others.
But deep down in them they feel like you feel, Bigger, and in order to keep what they’ve got, they make themselves believe that men who work are not quite human.
