Sublime

“blackness was not a color but a lived experience.”

blacks “were rather weird creatures dedicated to nonviolence in the midst of a nation as violent as America is, has been, and will be.”

As the situation in the South degenerated after the 1954 Supreme Court decision on segregation, he was faced with a choice - either he must continue more and more to alter truth to make it conform to people’s comfort, or he must write the truth in the dim hope that people would alter their comfort to conform to it.

“It isn’t my nature to be an activist,” he told Studs Terkel in 1978, “but your vocation doesn’t necessarily conform to your nature.”

racial justice was for the good of all society, not just for the good of the oppressed.

Griffin “knew they were referring to the souls of prejudiced white Catholics,” and wondered “why they appeared to have so little ‘fear’ of alienating the souls of Negroes.”

he as an individual can live in dignity, even though he as a Negro cannot.

but they have warned me that any time the police see a Negro idling, especially one they do not recognize, they will surely question him. This is worrisome, certainly an experience any Negro wants to avoid.

How easy it was to destroy a man’s good name and reputation by suggesting he was in some way subversive or by calling him a communist.