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9fc0b84
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If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.
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truth
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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577123e
|
The Lord works through deeply flawed people, since He made so few of the other kind.
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god
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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a82befc
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It baffles me that people think that obliterating the past will save them from its consequences, as if throwing away the empty cake plate would help you lose weight.
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consequenses
the-past
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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8044e49
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In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.
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humanity
love
moral-meaning
followers
mass-murder
impotence
stalin
hitler
power
sin
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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1b03bfe
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It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world.
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lies
history
edcuation
inculcating
obediance
textbooks
social-order
loyalty
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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8d913aa
|
In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus.
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history
mlk
martin-luther-king
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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6a3ea67
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Unjust social orders do no fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor, though such appeals may be an important element; history teaches us that they fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down. Rarely do such revolutions emerge in a neat and morally pristine process.
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history
unjust-social-orders
oppressors
revolution
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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ec0248b
|
Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live."5"
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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026990d
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The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.
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truth
martin-luther-king-jr
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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04f2770
|
In politics, regards themselves as a moderate, because they know some other sumbitch who's twice as crazy as they are.
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politics
moderates
sumbitch
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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86e5606
|
Every minister worthy of the name has to walk the line between prophetic vision and spiritual sustenance, between telling people the comforting things they want to hear and challenging them with the difficult things they need to hear. In Oxford, Daddy began to feel as though all the members wanted him to do was to marry them and bury them and stay away from their souls.
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comfort
challenging
saving-souls
marrying
prophets
ministers
sustenance
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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7aff929
|
Oxford was as drenched in Dixie as we were, just about as Southern a town as you would ever hope to find, which generally was a good thing, because that meant that the weather was nice, except when it was hot enough to fry pork chops on the pavement, and the food was delicious, though it would thicken the walls of your arteries and kill you deader than Stonewall Jackson, and the people were big hearted and friendly, though it was not the ha..
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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c0758c6
|
What the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don't understand is how deeply the past holds the future in its grip--even, and perhaps especially, when it remains unacknowledged.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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6b6f57d
|
Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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073ce78
|
Anyone intent on moral clarity might want to find another book and, in fact, might not want to go anywhere near the enduring chasm of race in the United States.
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moral-clarity
united-states
race-relations
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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e986798
|
We want to transcend our history without actually confronting it. We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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3fd32d1
|
Tobacco put food on our tables, steeples on our churches, stains on our fingers, spots on our lungs, and contradictions in our hearts.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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9f53735
|
Racism was an important moral issue, one that the church needed to confront. Putting a black man in a position of honor and authority was a good thing, and if there was controversy over it, that was not a bad thing thing, either. People needed to work through these things, and not just in the abstract.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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8f91142
|
We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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b8f113b
|
When we said we were going to do something "directly," which is pronounced "dreckly," we meant that we were going to get to it sooner or later, one of these days, maybe never, and please don't ask again." --
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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9f7d295
|
We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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9340fae
|
Some things are worse than death... If a man lives, he must still live with himself.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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4d229c7
|
seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend. In "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. writes that his worst enemies are not the members of Citizens' Councils or the Ku Klux Klan but "the white moderate" who claims to support the goals of the movement but deplores its methods of protest ..
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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335f452
|
Not everything that is faced can be changed," Baldwin instructs, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced."24"
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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d35c96d
|
The federal government was entirely complicit. When President Roosevelt passed the Social Security Act of 1935, Southern conservatives and their Northern Republican allies forced the New Deal legislation to exclude domestic workers and farmworkers from all of its employment provisions. That shielded
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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0b357f2
|
You read yourself full, you pray yourself hot, and then you turn yourself loose.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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f4f1187
|
The world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain...
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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cfd68c9
|
What others might dismiss as the vagaries of fate, my father interpreted as dancing lessons from the Divine.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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a5324ba
|
We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here. Our failure to confront the historical truth about how African Americans finally won their freedom presents a major obstacle to genuine racial reconciliation.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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582d9e0
|
It was like watching a community you thought you knew reveal itself as something else.
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community
|
Timothy B. Tyson |
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95412aa
|
That we not become prejudiced against those are prejudiced, or whose prejudices. May no be our own.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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c2db51d
|
Emmett Till's death was an extreme example of the logic of America's national racial caste system. To look beneath the surface of these facts is to ask ourselves what our relationship is today to the legacies of that caste system - legacies that still end the lives of young African Americans for no reason other than the color of their American skin and the content of our national character. Recall that Faulkner, asked to comment on the Till..
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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a1c7e35
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When we blame those who brought about the brutal murder of Emmett Till, we have to count President Eisenhower, who did not consider the national honor at stake when white Southerners prevented African Americans from voting; who would not enforce the edicts of the highest court in the land, telling Chief Justice Earl Warren, 'All [opponents of desegregation] are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit ..
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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478342d
|
A local white bootlegger, idling under the store awning, accosted Major Stem. "Why'd you call that damned nigger woman 'Mrs. Shaw'?" he demanded. In those days, white Southerners did not use courtesy titles for their black neighbors. While it was permissible to call a favored black man "Uncle" or "Professor"--a mixture of affection and mockery--he must never hear the words "mister" or "sir." Black women were "girls" until they were old enou..
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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c43f067
|
He held his ground like a sweet gum stump trying hard to live in a spirit of love and action, not anger and reaction
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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df4b4b2
|
South where I grew up. In large measure, this reflected a racial and gender caste system that denied most other opportunities to African American women. That system was designed to ensure a ready supply of cheap black labor, especially for the Southern ruling classes that emerged out of slavery's old planter class. But the privilege of exploiting black labor extended even to fairly lowly whites; textile mill hands and poor farmers, for exam..
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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1220cb1
|
Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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c289077
|
So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court building - 'Equal Justice Under Law' - can obscure the obvious, particularly with the passage of time. There was no equal justice, no universal protection of law in the Mississippi Delta, certainly not in 1955.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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edbeee7
|
I knew that I could talk for the rest of my life about what happened to my baby, I could explain it in great detail, I could describe what I saw laid out there on that slab at A. A. Rayner's place, one piece, one inch, one body part at a time. I could do all of that and people would still not get the full impact. . . . They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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9c41560
|
In the South's calculation it took only "one drop" of black blood to make a person black."
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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4d678e8
|
Mamie now envisioned God's purpose for her life--and for her son's life: "I took the privacy of my own grief and turned it into a public issue, a political issue, one which set in motion the dynamic force that ultimately led to a generation of social and legal progress for this country."32" --
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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5ebc83d
|
Not everything that is faced can be changed," Baldwin instructs, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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2feef83
|
We must look at the facts squarely, not to flounder in a bitter nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise rooted in the living ingredients of our own history.
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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8d0847e
|
What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?
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Timothy B. Tyson |