Dbady

“Adoring fans, hipsters, bohemians, and wannabes lined up outside the narrow storefront club at 5 Cooper Square, hoping to catch Monk and his legendary quartet—John Coltrane, bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and drummer Shadow Wilson. That night, Monk wanted to celebrate. Friends, family, and enthusiastic fans surrounded him. His “‘un’ years,” as his wife Nellie used to call them, were about to end.”
― Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“Dr. King constantly warned us that we would not be able to build a truly liberatory movement without the “strength to love.” In his 1963 book of the same title, he wrote: We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but still we are confined in an oppressive prison of segregation and discrimination. Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our personalities…. To guard ourselves from bitterness, we need the vision to see in this generation’s ordeals the opportunity to transfigure both ourselves and American society. Our present suffering and our nonviolent struggle to be free may well offer to Western civilization the kind of spiritual dynamic so desperately needed for survival.”
― Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Thelonious Monk had much to celebrate on October 10, 1957. It was his fortieth birthday, and after more than two decades of scuffling his career was on an upswing.”
― Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“Such legislation never considers the psychological distress Black, brown, and Indigenous students frequently endure as a result of whitewashed curricula, tracking, suspensions and expulsions on the slightest pretext, even abuses by law enforcement inside their own classrooms.”
― Robin D.G. Kelley