Luther Alice Quotes

If this were a courageous country, it would ask Gloria to lead it since she is sane and funny and beautiful and smart and the National Leaders we've always had are not. When I listen to her talk about women's rights children's rights men's rights I think of the long line of Americans who should have been president, but weren't. Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth. John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo. Imagine President Martin Luther King confronting the youthful "Oppie" Oppenheimer. Imagine President Malcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President Stevie Wonder dealing with the "Truly Needy." Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, or Sweet Honey in the Rock dealing with Anything. It is imagining to make us weep with frustration, as we languish under real estate dealers, killers, and bad actors.

Merger Evers/John F. Kennedy/Malcolm X/Martin Luther King/Robert Kennedy/Che Guevara/Patrice Lamumba/George Jackson/Cynthia Wesley/Addie Mae Collins/Denise McNair/Carole Robertson/Viola Liuzzo It was a decade marked by death. Violent and inevitable. Funerals became engraved on the brain, intensifying the ephemeral nature of life. For many in the South it was a decade reminiscent of earlier times, when oak trees sighed over their burdens in the wind; Spanish moss draggled blood to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in mourners that they strutted, without noticing their feet, along the thin backs of benches: their piercing shouts of anguish and joy never interrupted by an inglorious fall. They shared rituals for the dead to be remembered.

In Mississippi, where I lived from 1967 to 1974, people who challenged the system anticipated menace, battery, even murder, every day. In this context, I sometimes felt ashamed that my contributions at the time were not more radical. I taught in two local black colleges, I wrote about the Movement, and I created tiny history booklets which were used to teach the teachers of children enrolled in Head Start. And, of course, I was interracially married, which was illegal. It was perhaps in Mississippi during those years that I understood how the daily news of disaster can become, for the spirit, a numbing assault, and that one's own activism, however modest, fighting against this tide of death, provides at least the possibility of generating a different kind of "news." A "news" that empowers rather that defeats. There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the mountaintop. Gandhi dying with the name of God on his lips. Sojourner Truth baring her breasts at a women's rights convention in 1851. Harriet Tubman exposing her revolver to some of the slaves she had freed, who, fearing an unknown freedom, looks longingly backward to their captivity, thereby endangering the freedom of all. To be such a person or to witness anyone at this moment of transcendent presence is to know that what is human is linked, by a daring compassion, to what is divine. During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world I have seen fear turn into courage. Sorrow into joy. Funerals into celebrations. Because whatever the consequences, people, standing side by side, have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough *to be that* - which is the foundation of activism. It has become a common feeling, I believe, as we have watched our heroes falling over the years, that our own small stone of activism, which might not seem to measure up to the rugged boulders of heroism we have so admired, is a paltry offering toward the building of an edifice of hope. Many who believe this choose to withhold their offerings out of shame. This is the tragedy of our world. For we can do nothing substantial toward changing our course on the planet, a destructive one, without rousing ourselves, individual by individual, and bringing our small, imperfect stones to the pile. In this regard, I have a story to tell.

One school is changing the rules, giving kids a “happy meal” of a different sort. This lunch doesn’t come in a box printed with puzzles, but rather from a garden planted by the kids themselves. Alice Waters, a major proponent of the organic food movement who is credited with developing California Cuisine, piloted the Edible Schoolyard. Waters started the program in 1994 in Berkeley, an outgrowth of the Chez Panisse Foundation, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School.* Students turned the school’s parking lot into a garden, or an “edible schoolyard.” Teachers and students cleared the land and developed a garden to teach kids about the entire process of how food comes from the earth to their plates. Kids don’t just eat the food; they experience it. And they start to choose it over unhealthy food.

I was in this Charlie Munger–influenced type transition—sort of back and forth. It was kind of like during the Protestant Reformation. And I would listen to Martin Luther one day and the Pope the next. Ben Graham, of course, being the Pope.

have assembled a partial list: Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877; Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow; Tina Cassidy, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait?: Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson, and the Fight for the Right to Vote; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63; and Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth. I would also recommend reading writings by or about some of the pivotal figures in the fight for political equality, such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr.

SATURDAY, APRIL 4 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Galatians 6:9 (NIV) WRITING IS MY CALLING. EVEN without compensation, I would write. My latest book explores the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I wrote the first draft in 2005. Countless editors rejected it. Over ten years, I rewrote the manuscript no fewer than eight times. Each new revision was denied for publication. As an orator and Bible scholar, Dr. King said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” I was tempted to quit on many days as my manuscript received mountain-high rejection notices. Isaiah’s words comforted me, “But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31, KJV). Ultimately I did not quit or cave to self-defeat, and my book was finally published in 2018. The decade that I spent revising the text proved to be a priceless exercise in learning patience and sharpening my writing skills. My dream was deferred, but it was not denied. And here is a spiritual nugget that was gleaned from my ten-year writing journey: The soul will grow weary when it toils toward an unseen promise. Yet, as I labor to attain the vision that I hold for myself, the Spirit of the Lord strengthens my heart and emotions as I press ahead. What are you laboring to achieve? If you refuse to quit, Jesus will touch you with His unwavering perseverance. Despite what happens in the process, never give up on yourself. Press onward. Jesus will bring you to a successful finish. —ALICE THOMPSON

we find ourselves in the year 2002 with an unelected president who came to office by disenfranchising black voters, just as was done, routinely, before Martin Luther King, Jr., and the rest of us were born. This is a major suffering for black people and must not be overlooked. I myself, on realizing what had happened, felt a soul sickness I had not experienced in decades. Those who wanted power beyond anything else—oil and the money to be made from oil (which is the Earth Mother’s blood)—were contemptuous of the sacrifices generations of our ancestors made.