Quotes About Injustice

It has never yet been a world right for love, for those we love, for ourselves, for flowered human life.

When the boy hopped away, Azar clucked his tongue and said, 'War's a bitch.' He shook his head sadly. 'One leg, for Crissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo.

Tim Vicary Historical Novels Nobody's Slave

Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise would force whites to either push for change (which they would perceive as against their interests) or live consciously as hypocrites who speak of freedom and opportunity but perpetuate a system of inequality.

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.

When you're a member of the privileged group, you don't take kindly to someone telling you that you can't do something

We relied on the slave labor of African peoples to build the levees that protected our homes and farmland, to harvest and cook our food, to care for our children, to chop, and hoe, and sweat, and sew, and nurse us back to health, while we aspired to be persons of leisure, or at least to leave the really brutal work to them.

And let's not forget that George Washington "loved the Indians," according to Glenn Beck,126 never mind that he waged an annihilationist war against them. Indeed, Washington wrote to Major General John Sullivan, imploring him to "lay waste" to all Iroquois settlements, so that their lands may not be "merely overrun but destroyed."127

Timothy B. Tyson

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

he was informed that he would not be receiving a pension. "Of course, they didn't tell me that it was because of what I said," he told Torres and Uriarte, "but I figured it out. Twenty-six years of service went down the drain.…"[20]

Noble as the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were, it was obvious before the ink was dry that they clashed with a central fact of everyday life in America: slavery.

A mere look, word, or motion,—a mistake, accident, or want of power,—are all matters for which the slave may be whipped at any time," wrote Douglass

His curiosity aroused by seeing Sophia read the Bible, Douglass asked her to teach him. Naively, she agreed. He caught on rapidly, and Sophia was proud enough of her student to mention his progress to Hugh. He exploded. Literacy, he cried, would "spoil the best nigger in the world," and "unfit him to be a slave.