Quotes from Timothy B. Tyson

In politics, everyone regards themselves as a moderate, because they know some other sumbitch who's twice as crazy as they are.

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.

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.

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.

Most of us would rather claim to have always been perfect that admit how much we have grown.

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.

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.

Tobacco put food on our tables, steeples on our churches, stains on our fingers, spots on our lungs, and contradictions in our hearts.

Some things are worse than death... If a man lives, he must still live with himself.

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.

Not everything that is faced can be changed," Baldwin instructs, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced."24

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.

The ruthless attack inflicted injuries almost certain to be fatal. They reveal a breathtaking level of savagery, a brutality that cannot be explained without considering rabid homicidal intent or a rage utterly beyond control. Affronted white supremacy drove every blow.

The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam's and Bryant's acquittals: "The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don't want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.

We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.

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.

We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy.