Quotes from David J. Garrow

The real goal, however, was not to defeat the white man, but "to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority.… The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community" where all men would treat each other as brothers and equals. "There are great resources of goodwill in the southern white man that we must somehow tap,

Mass action by everyday black people was just as powerful a tool for social change as the lawsuit, and maybe more so. If

essence of nonviolence was a refusal to retaliate against evil, a refusal based on the realization that "the law of retaliation is the law of the multiplication of evil.

We must understand," Rustin wrote, "that our refusal to accept jim crow in specific areas challenges the entire social, political and economic order that has kept us second class citizens.… Those who oppose us, understand this.

King spoke of how the Pilgrimage would be an appeal to the nation, and the Congress, to pass a civil rights bill that would give the Justice Department the power to file law suits against discriminatory registration and voting practices anywhere in the South.

What is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, fed, and sustained by students.

King remarked, thinking back to Montgomery four years earlier. "If there is one lesson experience has taught us … it is that when you have found by the help of God a correct course, a morally sound objective, you do not equivocate, you do not retreat—you struggle to win a victory.

Coretta told Daddy King of Kennedy's phone call as they prepared to see Morris Abram. King, Sr., was ecstatic, and said that this was enough to shift his traditionally Republican presidential preference and vote instead for Kennedy, the man who had called his daughter-in-law.

I think I received a new understanding of the meaning of suffering," he wrote Harold DeWolf, "and I came away more convinced than ever before that unearned suffering is redemptive." The imprisonment had not been pleasant, but he did feel that his faith had benefited from the experience.20

A Springfield "horseshoe" was an often grotesque open-faced sandwich in which a piece of meat was covered first with french fries and then with a cheeselike sauce. Visitors knowledgeable enough to avoid the local delicacy felt rightfully proud. The statement that Springfield was a city of "bad hotels and worse food" was perhaps apocryphal, but there was no shortage of bars, because drinking was state politicos' top recreational activity.

The time had come, King said, to "move from protest to reconciliation.

King told the student leaders not to forget that the struggle was justice versus injustice, not black versus white, and reminded them always to be open to compromise with local whites.

Tell Montgomery they can keep shooting and I'm going to stand up to them; tell Montgomery they can keep bombing and I'm going to stand up to them. If I had to die tomorrow morning I would die happy because I've been to the mountaintop and I've seen the promised land and it's going to be here in Montgomery.

the Negro must come to the point of refusing to cooperate with evil," but without ever hating the evildoers. "I have no malice toward anyone, not even the white policeman who almost broke my arm, who choked and kicked me. Let there be no malice among you.

Barack confessed that "during the course of campaigning" "sometimes you lose" your "core truthfulness" and "it becomes a performance

young Barack spent most of his time with his fit and youthful forty-five-year-old grandfather.

As a prominent African American, Chicago-based theologian who worshiped in the same church later emphasized, above all else, including color, complexion, and race, first and foremost Barack "Obama is Hawaiian.

Gay liberation was not part of the Comparative Politics course, but Goldyn drew "a good-sized crowd" one evening during that term when he spoke on gay activism, and a column he wrote for the student newspaper ended by declaring that "the point of liberation, sexual or otherwise, is to rewrite the rules." Goldyn made a huge impact on Barry Obama.

Maya Soetoro-Ng declined comment to a reporter, but a family friend explained that "she was furious" over Barack's comments about their grandmother. His characterization of her "seemed completely gratuitous, even cruel," one critic rightly thought, and one of the late Stanley Dunham's close friends acidly remarked, "I have a far better opinion of both Stan and Madelyn than I have heard from Barry's speeches.

Only an extreme control freak would withhold his academic transcripts from public view simply so as to avoid any public discussion of what possible ideological influence either Walder's impressive reading list or Len Davis's teaching about the political uses of fiction might have had upon an intellectually hungry twenty-one-year-old mind.

Several weeks later, President Eisenhower complained to reporters that Nixon had lost simply because of a "couple of phone calls.

money is the original sin in politics and I am not sinless.

failure to respect the dignity and worth of all human personality.

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.