Sublime

American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist.

it. Unfazed, Wilson used his power as chief executive to segregate the federal government.

We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail. Half the time I feel like I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knothole in the fence….”

It was crazy to run and crazy not to run. How could a boy look past the school’s property line, see that free and living world beyond, and not contemplate a dash to freedom? To write one’s own story for once. To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity.

She loves feeling that every headway man tries to make

Because she knew that, if it came down to her word versus Loretta’s, she would always be believed. And knowing this, she felt, for the first time, truly white.

In a chapter called “Egotism in Work and Art” he launches an extraordinary, racially tinged attack on jazz, “the clearest of all signs of our age’s deep-seated predilection for barbarism.”

“Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.” “Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?” Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”

Wilson’s legacy was extensive: he effectively closed the Democratic Party to African Americans for another two decades, and parts of the federal government remained segregated into the 1950s and beyond.