Quotes from Timothy B. Tyson

According to William Bradford Huie, Milam later justified Till's lynching using the terms of violent racial and sexual politics: Just as long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are going to stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government

The murder of Emmett Till was reported in one of the very first banner headlines of the civil rights era and launched the national coalition that fueled the modern civil rights movement.

Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.

Some things are worse than death,' Wright told Brown. 'If a man lives, he must still live with himself.' "19

The so-called war on drugs successfully targets young African American men, even though blacks and whites use and sell illicit drugs at roughly the same rate.

People everywhere are joining to fight because of the way Emmett Till died—but also because of the way he was forced to live.

Emmett did not have to go to Mississippi to learn that white folks could take offense even at the presence of a black child, let alone one who violated local customs.

We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.15

After all, how do you give a crash course in hatred to a boy who has only known love?

They beat hell out of you for any reason or no reason. It's the greatest pleasure of their lives.

It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi," the NAACP declared in a 1947 petition to the United Nations. The petition, which decried "the denial of human rights to minorities in the case of citizens of Negro descent in the United States," created an "international sensation

Like many white citizens over the years, members of the Council believed that anything that weakened white supremacy or challenged the existing social hierarchy in any way was socialism. But this was largely code for preserving the country's racial caste system, centuries in the making.

In the South's calculation it took only "one drop" of black blood to make a person black.

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."30

And it is no surprise that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant would assume they could murder Emmett Till without

But as I'd learned my new trade at a deeper level, I'd discovered that I had not escaped the call to ministry as cleanly as I might have thought. I had not only followed my mother into the classroom but my father into the pulpit, never mind that I preached on weekdays instead of Sundays. There I was, pacing the lecture hall with chalk dust on my pants, day after day.

If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.

The Lord works through deeply flawed people, since He made so few of the other kind.

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.

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.

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.

Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live."5

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.

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.