"The isolation units which had existed in the past had been dismantled years ago, in an effort to remove from view the most blatant stances of inhumanity. Needless to say, that had not succeeded; inhumanity seethed from all the cracks and crevices of that place."
"They all explained that they had been driven by necessity to apply for this kind of job. Apparently it was one of the highest-paying jobs in New York that did not require a college education. In a way, these officers were prisoners themselves, and some of them were keenly aware that they were treading ambiguous waters. Like their predecessors, the Black overseers, they were guarding their sisters in exchange for a few bits of bread. And like the overseers, they too would discover that part of the payment for their work was their own oppression."
"The other weekly meeting place was the movies - that is, if the projector was not broken. Not even the curiosity that attracted me to the church services could make me attend one of these insipid Hollywood movies. Needless to say, it was a favorite trysting place for homosexual couples."
"Once I felt settled in the main population, my thoughts naturally turned toward the possibility of collective political activity in jail. Many people are unaware of the fact that jail and prison are two entirely different institutions... Jails are primarily for pretrial confinement, holding places until prisoners are either convicted or found innocent. More than half of the jail population have never been convicted of anything, yet they languish in these cells. Because the bail system is inherently biased in the favor of the relatively well-off, jails are disproportionately inhabited by the poor, who cannot afford the fee."
"Then it occurred to me that anyone in his place would have done the same thing - it was the madness of the institution he served that was driving him to hysterically search the hem of my skirt and the seams of my blouse."
"She seemed a fitting representative of the government of California. That state held the dubious distinction of being one of the most advanced in the country when it came to quelling resistance. California could already claim more than its share of victims. I could trace the history of my political involvement there by the number of funerals I had attended."
"The more steeped in violence our environment became, the more determined my father and mother were that I, the first-born, learn that the battle of white against Black was not written into the nature of things. On the contrary, my mother always said, love had been ordained by God. White people's hatred of us was neither natural nor eternal."
"The white people in the store were at first confused when they saw two Black people sitting in the 'whites only' section, but when they heard our accents and conversations in French, they too seemed to be pleased and excited by seeing Black people from so far away they could not possibly be a threat."
"This was my first introduction to class differences among my own people. We were the not-so-poor. Until my experiences at school, I believed that everyone else lived the way we did."
"On the one hand, there was a strong tendency affirming our identity as Black people that ran through all the school activities. But on the other hand, many teachers tended to inculcate in us the official, racist explanation for our misery. And they encouraged an individualistic, competitive way out of this torment. We were told that the ultimate purpose of our education was to provide us with the skills and knowledge to lift ourselves singly and separately out of the muck and slime of poverty by 'our own bootstraps.'"
"It hurt to see us folding in on ourselves, using ourselves as whipping posts because we did not yet know how to struggle against the real cause of our misery."
"About the time I entered high school, the civil rights movement was beginning to awaken some Black Alabamians from their deep but fretful sleep."
"At fourteen, in my junior year, I felt restless and exceedingly limited. The provincialism of Birmingham bothered me, and I had not yet been swept up into the Civil Rights Movement to the extent that it could forge for me a solid raison d'etre. I could not define or articulate the dissatisfaction I felt. I simply had the sensation of things closing in on me - and I wanted to get out."
"What had seemed a personal hatred of me, an inexplicable refusal of Southern whites to confront their own emotions, and a stubborn willingness of Blacks to acquiesce, became the inevitable consequences of a ruthless system which kept itself alive and well by encouraging spite, competition and the oppression of one group by another. Profit was the word: the cold and constant motive for the behavior, the contempt and the despair I had seen."
"James Baldwin announced that he could not continue his lectures without contradicting his moral conscience and abdicating his political responsibilities."
"In this city of in its position of trying to recuperate from tourists and fleas - in this group of typically American students which without my presence would have been lily-white - my old familiar feelings of disorientation were rekindled."
"When the news broke in Paris that Kennedy had been shot, everyone rushed down to the U.S> Embassy... Nevertheless, I felt out of place at the Embassy, surrounded by crowds of 'Americans in Paris' and it was difficult to identify with their weeping. I wondered how many of them had she tears - or had truly felt saddened - when they read the Herald Tribune story about the murders of Carole, Cynthia, Addie Mae and Denise."
"But each day it was becoming clearer to me that my ability to accomplish anything was directly dependent on my ability to contribute something concrete to the struggle."
"As in the United States, there was a natural inclination to identify the enemy as the white man. Natural because the great majority of white people, both in the United States and England, have been carriers of the racism which, in reality, benefits only a small number of them - the capitalists... When white people are indiscriminately viewed as the enemy, it is virtually impossible to develop a political solution."
"For me revolution was never an interim 'thing-to-do' before settling down; it was no fashionable club with newly minted jargon, or new kind of social life - made thrilling by risk and confrontation, made glamorous by costume. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary's life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime."
"My overall vision of the school I directed was of a place where political understanding was forged and sharpened, where consciousness became explicit and was urged in a revolutionary direction."
"In this way he subtly criticized me for having romanticized something which was really nothing more than terribly hard work. It was then that I began to realize the true meaning of underdevelopment: it is nothing to be utopianized. Romanticizing the plight of oppressed people is dangerous and misleading."
"What he wanted to do was to point the finger at the real criminal: a society which keeps Black people imprisoned in such atrocious conditions of oppression that too often it is a question of stealing or going under."
"Jails are thoughtless places. Thoughtless in the sense that no thinking is done by the administration; no problem-solving or rational evaluation of any situation slightly different from the norm. The void created by this absence of thought is filled by rules and the fear of establishing a precedent (meaning a rule they had not yet digested)."
"One small twist of fate and I might have drowned in the muck of poverty and disease and illiteracy. That is why I never felt I had the right to look upon myself as being any different from my sisters and brothers who did all the suffering, for all of us."
"Mrs. Hemphill's story was the universal story of the Black woman in a world that wants to see her crushed. Mrs. Hemphill had overcome. My mother had overcome. But many others had not. The system was pointed against us. That was what had come through so powerfully in Mrs. Hemphill's words. My own present predicament was, on a different level, evidence of that same politically, economically, socially hostile world which almost every Black women must contend with every day of her life."
"The more the movement for my freedom increased in numbers, strength, and confidence, the more imperative it became for everyone to see if not as something exceptional but as a small part of a great fight against injustice, one bough in a solidly rooted tree of resistance. It was not only political repression, but racism, poverty, police brutality, drugs, and all the myriad ways Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and white working people are kept chained to misery and despair. And it was not only within the United States of America, but in countries like Vietnam, with the bombs falling like rain from U.S. B52's, burning and dismembering innocent children."
"I sank deep into the moment, husbanding this delight, hoarding it. For I knew it would be short-lived. Work, Struggle. Confrontation lay before us like a rock-strewn road. We would walk it... But first the grass, the sun... and the people."
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