The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook

What the White South confronted in the movement era was a paradigm shift. There was a model for sustaining White supremacy: terrorizing Black folks, the dispassionate acquiescence of the White North and the federal government, economic control, and an ideological hold on its ranks managed by humiliation and cruelty. But a model only holds as long a

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I truly had not realized that Harlem had so many stores until I saw them all smashed open; the first time the word wealth ever entered my mind in relation to Harlem was when I saw it scattered in the streets. But one’s first, incongruous impression of plenty was countered immediately by an impression of waste. None of this was doing anybody any goo

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At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans—lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession—either to come to terms

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The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is ther

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