[I cried twice reading the book. First when I saw pictures of Grace still showing up at protests in her 80s and again when reading about Jimmy’s death. This book has filled me with renewed hope and excitement for the future and opened new avenues of exploration of curiosity. Reading Grace’s story makes me feel part of a sacred lineage of revolutionaries and visionaries and dreamers. That she was thinking about the meaning of community with her friends in 1968 gives me hope. The resonating question I am carrying forward is how I can grow to love a people and place enough to want to change it? And what are the relationships I need to nurture to grow in that love?]
“Jimmy was always reminding us that in ourselves we are nobodies. ‘It is only in relation to other bodies and many somebodies that anybody is somebody. Don’t get into your cotton-picking mind that you are somebody in yourself.’”
“Slowly but surely I was being prepared to take my place in the world. For if we shape reality by how we think, we can also change reality by what we do.”
“Over the years my dissatisfaction with American schools has been heavily influenced by Dewey’s insistence that education be of the hand as well as the head and his allegation that the preoccupation of Western philosophers with the head has its roots in ancient Greece, where manual work was considered inferior because it was done by women and slaves.”
“My approach to political questions came more from books, his from experience. We struggled over almost every issue. But I felt myself growing from the struggle, and I could also see the growth in him.”
“In retrospect, I suspect that his confidence in his own judgment and his boldness in making projections, which never ceased to amaze me, came in part from his relationship with elders. Constantly talking over the past with old folks apparently provided him with a solid foundation for evaluating the present and building the future.”
“Jimmy believed that revolutions should be made for love of people and place, not because of hate.”
“He had no illusions about the electoral system, but voting for him was a confirmation and continuing reaffirmation of his citizenship and his readiness to take responsibility for running Detroit and American society.”
“His ideas, while still brilliant, struck me as increasingly abstract because he was not rooted in any place or any ongoing struggle.”
“My ideas were beginning to come from reality and not just from books. I had voted in every election, something that, as a radical, I had previously disdained to do. I was no longer a nomad but a citizen. Detroit had become my home, the place and the city for which I felt responsible.”
“A Negro Revolution is the kind which liberal whites could accept because it would simply incorporate the black man into the corruption of existing white society. A Black Revolution, however, would center around struggle for control of ‘land’ (economic resources) and would have to take the steps necessary for such control.”
“Today, nearly thirty years later, despite the loss of hundreds of thousands like Harvey to street violence, drugs, and prison, this street force is even larger than it was in 1968. It is also more desperate because with the export of production jobs overseas, more and more of our young people are seen and see themselves as expendable. At the same time, there is no longer the same readiness to sacrifice, the same confidence in themselves as agents for revolutionary change that moved thousands of black street youth to join the party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.”
“Jimmy never tired of saying that just coming out of your mother’s womb does not make you a human being. He insisted that people become human through the choices that they make. Malcolm, he reminded us, had transformed himself from a hustler to a man ready to take responsibility for his own life and the lives of his people.”
“But Jimmy was equally demanding of blacks. Being a victim of oppression in the United States, he insisted, is not enough to make you revolutionary, just as dropping out of your mother’s womb is not enough to make you human.”
“To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical/spiritual leap and become more human human beings. In order to change/ transform the world, they must change/ transform themselves.”
“Hocker’s stories gave me an opportunity to distinguish between the church and religion, and to analyze religion as something that human beings down through the ages have created to help us understand our place in the universe and provide us with the moral energy to carry on struggles between right and wrong.”
“Even though he would not be caught using the word, he knew our capacity to create, to love, to think unthinkable thoughts, to see the unseen. He knew that we are sacred and that we have a great capacity to struggle, to change, to transform ourselves, to change the world.”
“At one point I initiated a heated discussion in our little group by proposing that since one of the most important contributions of the women’s movement has been its critique of scientific rationalism, we should propose a ten-year moratorium on scientific research so that the world can grapple with the fundamental question of whether we should do things just because we have the know-how and power to do them.”
“Instead of using schools as institutions to advance individual careers, I argued, we must start turning them into places to develop our children into responsible citizens - by involving them in community-building activities, such as planting community gardens, preparing school and community meals, building playgrounds, cleaning up our rivers and neighborhoods.”
“I knew Jimmy was going to die, but I didn’t expect it. The difference is subtle but real. When you expect something, you imagine it. But Jimmy remained so alert and active almost to the very end that I never imagined being on my own.”
“In the past few years I have gotten into the habit of referring to one of my favorite passages in The Sayings of Confucius: ‘At fifteen I thought only of study; at thirty I began playing my role; at forty I was sure of myself; at fifty I was conscious of my position in the universe; at forty I was sure of myself; at fifty I was conscious of my position in the universe; at sixty I was no longer argumentative; and now at seventy I can follow my heart’s desire without violating custom.”
“Ping never decided which groups or causes to support on the basis of their chances for success. As he put it, ‘It is not necessary to succeed in order to strive.’”
“I was reminded of Dorothy Garner’s insistence that we have to stop thinking that every problem has to be solved by an expert.”
“If we go along with the global economy, which means the export of jobs to wherever labor is cheapest, our deindustrialized cities will become increasingly dependent on casino gambling and new sports stadiums as our local ‘industries,’ both of which reinforce capitalist values, consumerism, and individualism and thus lead to more crime, violence, and disunity.”
“In recent years, especially with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is becoming clearer to me that just as we should not try to create twenty-first-century cities that look like twentieth-century ones, we should not try to make twenty-first-century revolutions on the model of twentieth-century ones.
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