King Baldwin Quotes

A King may move a man, a father may claim a son, but remember that even when those who move you be Kings, or men of power, your soul is in your keeping alone. When you stand before God, you cannot say, "But I was told by others to do thus." Or that, "Virtue was not convenient at the time." This will not suffice. Remember that.

John’s heart was hardened against the Lord. His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.

. . . and what in the world was I by now but an aging, lonely, sexually dubious, politically outrageous, unspeakably erratic freak?

Recognition is a human need, and there is something fundamentally violent about a world that denies Black women recognition on a regular basis.

Black women exist—and exist positively.

White women sought their right to vote as a symbol of parity with their husbands, brothers, and sons. Black women sought their right to vote as a means of empowering their communities and escaping reigns of terror.

The only mainstream American household I know well is the one I grew up in, and I can report that my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever, because Time magazine put them on its cover and Time, for my father, was the ultimate cultural authority. In the last decade, the magazine whose red border twice enclosed the face of James Joyce has devoted covers to Scott Turow and Stephen King. These are honorable writers; but no one doubts it was the size of their contracts that won them covers. The dollar is now the yardstick of cultural authority, and an organ like Time, which not long ago aspired to shape the national taste, now serves mainly to reflect it.

What is most revelatory in the lives of these three women was their ability to push against, break down, and step over each and every challenge that came their way. They saw themselves and their children as being worthy of life, worthy of rights, and worthy of grace.

We must highlight the experiences of Black mothers and appreciate their ability to bring life no matter how often it is denied them. Their humanity is removed when they are forgotten, when they are not given the credit they earned, and when their names fade from history.

My birth certificate says: Female Negro Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro In Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. is planning a march on Washington, where John F. Kennedy is president. In Harlem, Malcolm X is standing on a soapbox talking about a revolution. Outside the window of University Hospital, snow is slowly falling. So much already covers this vast Ohio ground. In Montgomery, only seven years have passed since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus. I am born brown-skinned, black-haired and wide-eyed. I am born Negro here and Colored there and somewhere else, the Freedom Singers have linked arms, their protests rising into song: Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome someday. and somewhere else, James Baldwin is writing about injustice, each novel, each essay, changing the world. I do not yet know who I’ll be what I’ll say how I’ll say it . . . Not even three years have passed since a brown girl named Ruby Bridges walked into an all-white school. Armed guards surrounded her while hundreds of white people spat and called her names. She was six years old. I do not know if I’ll be strong like Ruby. I do not know what the world will look like when I am finally able to walk, speak, write . . . Another Buckeye! the nurse says to my mother. Already, I am being named for this place. Ohio. The Buckeye State. My fingers curl into fists, automatically This is the way, my mother said, of every baby’s hand. I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm’s—raised and fisted or Martin’s—open and asking or James’s—curled around a pen. I do not know if these hands will be Rosa’s or Ruby’s gently gloved and fiercely folded calmly in a lap, on a desk, around a book, ready to change the world . . .

Without missing a beat I continue to play our black Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano and say, “Not now! Mommy and Daddy are working!” The girls get the message and withdraw.

Marcus Garvey reached the height of his power with more than seven hundred UNIA branches in thirty-eight states.

Their lives did not begin with motherhood; on the contrary, long before their sons were even thoughts in their minds, each woman had her own passions, dreams, and identity.

Simplicity is king. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal. (in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review)

In all three cases, the mothers’ worst fears became reality: each woman was alive to bury her son. It is an absolute injustice that far too many Black mothers today can say the same thing.

James Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook—Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,” published in The Fire Next Time in 1963 (the same year Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., penned another seminal and brilliant epistolary essay, “Letter from Birmingham

They come through Ellis Island, where Giorgio becomes Joe, Pappavasiliu becomes Palmer, Evangelos becomes Evans, Goldsmith becomes Smith or Gold, and Avakian becomes King. So, with a painless change of name, and in the twinkling of an eye, one becomes a white American.

In her book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy Roberts writes that “between 1929 and 1941, more than 2,000 eugenic sterilizations were performed each year in the United States. It has been estimated that a total of over 70,000 persons were involuntarily sterilized under these [American] statutes.

When the Littles came home from school, Louise would reteach them what they had been taught by their white teachers. She refused to let her children fall victim to a mentality that told them they were inferior to anybody else. She made sure they knew how Black people were standing up for their rights not only in the United States but also around the world.

King told the audience that night, “was that black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that depicted them as inferior, born deficient, and deservedly doomed to servitude to the grave.” He went on to say that “so long as the lie was believed the brutality and criminality of conduct toward the Negro was easy for the conscience to bear.

In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior.… Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

The gap between white and black education, income, and mortality rates is as wide today as it was forty years ago.6 If you look into a hospital nursery and see a black infant and a white infant, you can predict which baby will die first, which one will make a higher income and have better education, just by the color of the baby’s skin. There is no area in American society (education, incarceration, income, preaching, and so on) where racial disparity isn’t operating.7 Martin Luther King Jr. could not have known how we would abuse his hope that we will not be judged by skin color but by character.8 King said nothing about blindness being a virtue. Jesus never praised blindness; on a notable occasions he healed it. When whites claim, “I am color-blind in my dealings with others,” it’s usually an indication of our ignorance of how we have been thoroughly indoctrinated into race. It’s like saying, “I am sinless,” meaning, “My sin is so dominant in this society that it just seems normal.” A first step is to name our whiteness. As James Baldwin said in The Fire Next Time, “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”9

Christine would fondly recall such moments, saying, “Every now and then, I have to chuckle as I realize there are people who actually believe ML [as Martin was sometimes called by his loved ones] just appeared. They think he simply happened, that he appeared fully formed, without context, ready to change the world. Take it from his big sister, that’s simply not the case. We are the products of a long line of activists and ministers. We come from a family of incredible men and women who served as leaders in their time and place, long before

American gynecology was built by torturing Black women and experimenting on their bodies to test procedures. J. Marion Sims, known as the father of American gynecology, developed his techniques by slicing open the vaginal tissues of enslaved women as they were held down by force. He refused to provide them with anesthesia. François Marie Prevost, who is credited with introducing C-sections in the United States, perfected his procedure by cutting into the abdomens of laboring women who were slaves. These women were treated like animals and their pain was ignored.

There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day or pointing to the election of Barack Obama, and in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a kind of historical gaslighting.

According to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, the average debt for court-related fines and fees in 2018 was $13,607. The median income of African American households was only $41,361 that year and $36,959 for households headed by African American females. While one in four women in the United States has a loved one behind bars, according to Essie Justice Group, one in two Black women has a loved one who is incarcerated. Many Black American women find themselves paying much of their income to the state as a result of the incarceration of their partners, children, and other family members.

Bertis, Louise, and Alberta, grew from children, to teenagers, to young women at a time when the birth of a nation characterized black men as scoundrels intent on brutalizing white women. When the pickaninny equated black children with animals. And during the Jim Crow years, when the most popular image of the black woman was the Mammy. This devoted domestic servant did not possess her own desires. She would do anything to please her white family. If black women acted in resistance to this image, if the spoke up for themselves, if they did not stay in their place, if they cared more for their own children than white ones, they would be punished.

minimizes the trauma, either by shifting blame for it onto fringe actors of the present (“These acts don’t represent who we are”), relative values of the times (“Everyone back then believed in slavery”), or, worst, back onto the traumatized (“They are responsible for themselves”). There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day or pointing to the election of Barack Obama, and in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a kind of historical gaslighting.

This book is fiction and all the characters are my own, but it was inspired by the story of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. I first heard of the place in the summer of 2014 and discovered Ben Montgomery’s exhaustive reporting in the Tampa Bay Times. Check out the newspaper’s archive for a firsthand look. Mr. Montgomery’s articles led me to Dr. Erin Kimmerle and her archaeology students at the University of South Florida. Their forensic studies of the grave sites were invaluable and are collected in their Report on the Investigation into the Deaths and Burials at the Former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. It is available at the university’s website. When Elwood reads the school pamphlet in the infirmary, I quote from their report on the school’s day-to-day functions. Officialwhitehouseboys.org is the website of Dozier survivors, and you can go there for the stories of former students in their own words. I quote White House Boy Jack Townsley in chapter four, when Spencer is describing his attitude toward discipline. Roger Dean Kiser’s memoir, The White House Boys: An American Tragedy, and Robin Gaby Fisher’s The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South (written with Michael O’McCarthy and Robert W. Straley) are excellent accounts. Nathaniel Penn’s GQ article “Buried Alive: Stories From Inside Solitary Confinement” contains an interview with an inmate named Danny Johnson in which he says, “The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in solitary confinement happens to me every day. It’s when I wake up.” Mr. Johnson spent twenty-seven years in solitary confinement; I have recast that quote in chapter sixteen. Former prison warden Tom Murton wrote about the Arkansas prison system in his book with Joe Hyams called Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal. It provides a ground’s-eye view of prison corruption and was the basis of the movie Brubaker, which you should see if you haven’t. Julianne Hare’s Historic Frenchtown: Heart and Heritage in Tallahassee is a wonderful history of that African-American community over the years. I quote the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. a bunch; it was energizing to hear his voice in my head. Elwood cites his “Speech Before the Youth March for Integrated Schools” (1959); the 1962 LP Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, specifically the “Fun Town” section; his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; and his 1962 speech at Cornell College. The “Negroes are Americans” James Baldwin quote is from “Many Thousands Gone” in Notes of a Native Son. I was trying to see what was on TV on July 3, 1975. The New York Times archive has the TV listings for that night, and I found a good nugget.

Their military experience made them more of a threat. Their pride was seen as something in need of control. Once again irrational white supremacist fears turned into extreme forms of brutality. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, no one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than Black Veterans who had proven their valor and courage as soldiers. Thousands of Black Veterans were assaulted, threatened, abused or lynched following military service. Violence targeted at Black Veterans and their families led to one of the bloodiest summers for Black Americans, known in history as the Red Summer. Approximately 25 race riots broke out across the United States. In different cities, white rioters attacked Black men, women, and children, targeted Black organizational meetings and destroyed Black homes and Black businesses. Hundreds of Black people were killed and thousands were injured in the onslaughts. service

Just because you are anti-police, that does not necessarily mean that your whiteness has disappeared or that anti-Black racism is gone. Remember what James Baldwin told us, “White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.”5 Even Dr. King—yes, the one that even conservatives love to tout as the content-of-your-character caricature—argued that he was disappointed in the “white moderate” who “is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice . . . who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”6 White liberals are who we should be concerned about. Of course, Malcolm X warned us to be aware of the fox and the wolf—by which he meant that white liberals would try and be your friend in order to take advantage of you, but the wolf would always make clear its intentions and commit an act of violence. Finally, let’s not forget the words of South African and Black Consciousness movement freedom fighter Steve Biko, who wrote of white liberals: Instead of involving themselves in an all-out attempt to stamp out racism from their white society, liberals waste lots of time trying to prove to as many blacks as they can find that they are liberal.

Baldwin and King, no matter the temperamental distance between them, moved together as they struggled to make real the promise of American democracy. King was the preacher, Baldwin the poet—and, of course, the two are interchangeable.

but many others who were silenced by the White House and by Black male leaders of the civil rights movement. Like… Black women. Daisy Bates read a short vow, a pledge on behalf of women working within the movement. But Dorothy Height, a powerful leader who helped organize the event and was the only woman to stand on the platform with Dr. King, was not invited to speak. Nor was Rosa Parks. Or so many other Black women whose work had fueled the movement. Black LGBTQ+ leaders. Bayard Rustin, a key adviser to Dr. King and an organizer of the event, was not invited to speak. Nor was James Baldwin, a Black novelist who, through his writings, had become a brilliant and bold political voice. Malcolm X. He attended the event but was not invited to speak.

Harris-Perry reminds us that we must never focus on Black women solely as a type of conquered victim but instead acknowledge the circumstances that have oppressed them, while simultaneously highlighting the ways in which they have reclaimed their agency despite these circumstances and made meaning of their lives in their own ways.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. —James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

During the murder investigation, police would remove boxes of Metallica and Slayer T-shirts and Stephen King books from the trailers where Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin lived, proof they would submit, of the pair’s satanic leanings. Jason Baldwin would later ask why the officers did not take any of his white T-shirts as evidence.

Apparently, President Collins put it in his will that if he were to die in office, another would take his place, until elections could be held to replace him. The replacement is not Vice President Kincaide, but the world-renowned billionaire, maker of kings and presidents, Michael J. Evans. He will make some type of speech in the coming days. Stay tuned to this network for further updates.” Evans called Baldwin, “General, I want you to declare Staff Sergeant Delaney a security risk. I demand his discharge, and if he isn’t discharged, I want him arrested. Can you do that?” “Why?” “Why? Because he assassinated the President of the United States, that’s why. Will you do what I ask of you?” “You tricked me,” “Am I going to have to call security to pick you up?” “No, I’ll do it. I’ll get on it right away,

Gerry and I were able to keep enough hits flowing out of our Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano to feel confident about being able to pay our mortgage.

While Saladin is attacking Reynald at Kerak: "As it happens, Raynald is hosting a wedding party for his wife's son, Humphrey of Toron, and princess Isabelle, King Baldwin's half sister, who is eleven years old.The pounding continues increasingly, but the guests have traveled from all over the Latin East for this party and they are not about to put an end to the festivities over a mere Moslem attack. Finally, Lady Stephanie, Raynald's wife, has her servants take some dishes from the wedding feast to Saladin's tent. Saladin is delighted to receive the gifts and offers profuse thanks to lady Stephanie. He then ask where the newly weds will be spending the night. When the servants point out the location, Saladin orders his army not to bombard that tower until morning.

Baldwin was not naïve about the human capacity for evil, especially among white folk. He knew intimately what it meant to be vulnerable to the whims of others who held a certain kind of power over you. “If you’re a Negro, you’re in the center of that peculiar affliction,” he said, “because anybody can touch you—when the sun goes down. You know, you’re the target of everybody’s fantasies.” Instead, what shocked him was the fact that white America killed someone who espoused love, an apostle of nonviolence. King’s death revealed the depths of their debasement and the scope of our peril. Baldwin

King wanted to make the case for massive direct action in Washington, D.C., on behalf of America’s poor, but he would need to marshal greater financial resources than ever before. Desegregating lunch counters didn’t cost much, but ending poverty would cost the nation billions of dollars. Sentimentality alone could not pay the bill.

1968, he also knew how the passage of the civil rights and voting rights acts a few years earlier offered white America the sense of self-congratulation that Black Power was now denying it. Seen in this way, the civil rights movement could easily be conscripted into a story of how Americans perfected the Union, where all of their sacrifices would become, with vicious irony, proof of America’s inherent goodness. The history they were making, in real time, could be bent in the service of the lie. For Baldwin, the movement had to challenge that lie at its root or it would consume us all, which is why, perhaps, he had dedicated his own introduction of King to telling a true story of the movement.

King conveyed the gravity of the moment in 1968 and the necessity for the Poor People’s Campaign, he conjured, without a hint of nostalgia, a history of the heroism of everyday people acting against all odds, a history no less full of disappointment and trauma. He

But, like Baldwin, King struggled with America’s commitment to the belief that white people mattered more and to the lie that made it palatable: I must honestly confess that I go through moments of disappointment when I have to recognize that there aren’t enough white persons in our country who are willing to cherish democratic principles over privilege. But I am grateful to God that some are left.

To this day, it is unclear who shot Martin Luther King, Jr.,

In 2017, Black women were imprisoned at twice the rate of white women.

While one in four women in the United States has a loved one behind bars, according to Essie Justice Group, one in two Black women has a loved one who is incarcerated

I’m more of the James Baldwin school: “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.

Dehumanization takes various forms. People are treated as less than human when their basic rights are not granted/respected, when their agency is taken away, when they are objectified through language and actions, when violence is used against them, and when they are expected to remain silent despite these circumstances.

The tragedies Black women have been subject to in this country are unique as a result of their intersecting identities, and they inform Black women’s varied approaches to faith and resistance. Any loss can become destabilizing when one is not afforded basic supports and instead is further victimized and blamed.

Christine would fondly recall such moments, saying, “Every now and then, I have to chuckle as I realize there are people who actually believe ML [as Martin was sometimes called by his loved ones] just appeared. They think he simply happened, that he appeared fully formed, without context, ready to change the world. Take it from his big sister, that’s simply not the case. We are the products of a long line of activists and ministers. We come from a family of incredible men and women who served as leaders in their time and place, long before ML was ever thought of.

But here’s the thing: Martin Luther King was not the “MLK” of his time, not the “MLK” of legend. Martin Luther King was public enemy number one. Seen as an even greater threat by our government, and a large portion of society, than Malcolm X was. Because what Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X fought for was the same: freedom from oppression. At times they used different words and different tactics, but it was their goal that was the threat. Their goal of freedom from racial oppression was and is a direct threat to the system of White Supremacy. And for all of Martin’s actions of peace and love, he was targeted with violence, harassed, arrested, blackmailed, followed by the FBI, and eventually murdered. For all of the pedestals MLK is now put on, far above the reach of ordinary black Americans, Martin was in his life viewed as the most dangerous man in America. Martin was the black man who asked for too much, too loudly. Martin was why white America couldn’t support equality. Because no matter what we ask for, if it threatens the system of White Supremacy, it will always be seen as too much. When we were slaves nursing their babies, we were not nice enough. When we were maids cleaning their homes we were not nice enough. When we were porters shining their shoes we were not nice enough. And when we danced and sang for their entertainment we were not nice enough. For hundreds of years we have been told that the path to freedom from racial oppression lies in our virtue, that our humanity must be earned. We simply don’t deserve equality yet. So when people say that they don’t like my tone, or when they say they can’t support the “militancy” of Black Lives Matter, or when they say that it would be easier if we just didn’t talk about race all the time—I ask one question: Do you believe in justice and equality? Because if you believe in justice and equality you believe in it all of the time, for all people. You believe in it for newborn babies, you believe in it for single mothers, you believe in it for kids in the street, you believe in justice and equality for people you like and people you don’t. You believe in it for people who don’t say please. And if there was anything I could say or do that would convince someone that I or people like me don’t deserve justice or equality, then they never believed in justice and equality in the first place. Yes, I am a Malcolm. And Martin, and Angela, Marcus, Rosa, Biko, Baldwin, Assata, Harriet, and Nina. I’m fighting for liberation. I’m filled with righteous anger and love. I’m shouting, as all before me have in their way. And I’m a human being who was born deserving justice and equality, and that is all you should need to know in order to stand by my side.

As with Dr. King, and Cleaver was explicit about his discomfort, Baldwin’s queerness unsettled him.

But from his perch in France, he had also seen the dawning of a mass movement in the United States and returned to bear witness to the courage and sacrifice of those he called “improbable aristocrats,” like the Little Rock Nine, Dr. King, and the young people who sat in at lunch counters across the South.

Still today, many Black families, especially those with members who live with mental illness, fear what might happen if they call for help. There have been numerous cases throughout history where Black people with mental illness have been locked away or even killed by those who were called to help them.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

Louise’s experiences as a poor Black immigrant woman in a racist city were completely ignored and misunderstood. Her ability to provide for her children for nearly a decade following her husband’s death is described as “maladjustment.” Her depression is described as a “change of personality.

In 1933, as the Third Reich began its reign of terror, Black American writers and activists were quick to draw connections between Nazi dictates and American race laws. It was a proven and commonly held belief that Hitler saw America’s approach to the Jim Crow laws as a model for his own eugenicist agenda.

Embarrassed that he had not recognized one of America’s best-known entertainers, whom he’d seen many times on television, Gunny escorted him to the stage, where Davis took his seat with the other celebrities who had made the trip, including Josephine Baker, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Rita Moreno, Harry Belafonte, James Baldwin, Ruby Dee, Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier, and Steve McQueen.

Lorde shows that dehumanization is a component of any society that views capital as more important than humanity and as something that affects and implicates all members of such a society. However, each member is inherently treated differently depending on levels of disadvantage.

There, on December 25, he was crowned Baldwin I, king of Jerusalem.

In each of them we find a manual on how to survive and persist in a country that stacks all the odds against you. We also see that the world is changeable and waiting on our instruction (198)

This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it. They didn't integrate it; they infiltrated it. They joined it, became a part of it, took it over, And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. They ceased to be angry. They ceased to be hot. They ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all. You had one right here in Detroit- I saw it on television- with clowns leading it, white clowns and black clowns. I know you don't like what I'm saying, but I'm going to tell you anyway. 'Cause I can prove what I'm saying. If you think I'm telling you wrong, you bring me Martin Luther King and A. Philip Randolph and James Farmer and those other three, and see if they'll deny it over a microphone. No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover. When James Baldwin came in from Paris, they wouldn't let him talk, 'cause they couldn't make him go by the script. Burt Lancaster read the speech that Baldwin was supposed to make; they wouldn't let Baldwin get up there, 'cause they know Baldwin's liable to say anything. They controlled it so tight- they told those...what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn't make; and then told them to get out town by sundown