Quotes from Timothy B. Tyson

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

You read yourself full, you pray yourself hot, and then you turn yourself loose.

What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?

Chicago activist Saul Alinsky sardonically defined integration as "the period of time between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white.

Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News, predicted, "If a decision is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on the Supreme Court steps."68

The world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain…

What others might dismiss as the vagaries of fate, my father interpreted as dancing lessons from the Divine.

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.

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.

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.

It was like watching a community you thought you knew reveal itself as something else.

That we not become prejudiced against those are prejudiced, or whose prejudices. May no be our own.

Lord you gave your only son to remedy a condition, but who knows but what the death of my only son might bring an end to lynching.

The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear about them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness.

He held his ground like a sweet gum stump trying hard to live in a spirit of love and action, not anger and reaction

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 example, frequently employed their black

What the migrants learned by word of mouth has since been established as fact. Mississippi outstripped the rest of the nation in virtually every measure of lynching: the greatest number of lynchings, the most lynchings per capita, the most lynchings without an arrest or conviction, the most female victims, the most multiple lynchings, and on and on.

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

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.

Rather than arrest the assailant, white police officers hauled off a black bystander who objected to their inaction.

Not everything that is faced can be changed," Baldwin instructs, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

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."13

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.

Milam and Bryant were not on a political mission when they pounded on Moses Wright's door, and they did not kidnap Emmett Till beneath the banner of states' rights, racial integrity, or white supremacy. The white men carried out their brutal errand in an atmosphere created by the Citizens' Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the mass of white public opinion, all of which demanded that African Americans remain the subservient mudsill of Mississippi—or die.