“The continuing struggle to align word and action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan—didn’t self-esteem finally depend on
just this? It was that belief which had led me into organizing, and it was that belief which would lead me to conclude, perhaps for the
final time, that notions of purity—of race or of culture—could no more serve as the basis for the typical black American’s self-esteem
than it could for mine. Our sense of wholeness would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we’d inherited. It would have to find root in Mrs. Crenshaw’s story and Mr. Marshall’s
story, in Ruby’s story and Rafiq’s; in all the messy, contradictory details of our experience.”