David J. Garrow > Quotes

“The real goal, however, was not to defeat the white man, but “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority.… The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community” where all men would treat each other as brothers and equals. “There are great resources of goodwill in the southern white man that we must somehow tap,”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“King’s primary responsibility, though, was to issue a call for action, and stress the need to expand the struggle on all fronts. Up to now we have thought of the color question as something which could be solved in and of itself. We know now that while it [is] necessary to say ‘No’ to racial injustice, this must be followed by a positive program of action: the struggle for the right to vote, for economic uplift of the people. A part of this is the realization that men are truly brothers, that the Negro cannot be free so long as there are poor and underprivileged white people.… Equality for Negroes is related to the greater problem of economic uplift for Negroes and poor white men. They share a common problem and have a common interest in working together for economic and social uplift. They can and must work together.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“King spoke of how the Pilgrimage would be an appeal to the nation, and the Congress, to pass a civil rights bill that would give the Justice Department the power to file law suits against discriminatory registration and voting practices anywhere in the South.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“King remarked, thinking back to Montgomery four years earlier. “If there is one lesson experience has taught us … it is that when you have found by the help of God a correct course, a morally sound objective, you do not equivocate, you do not retreat—you struggle to win a victory.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“Tell Montgomery they can keep shooting and I’m going to stand up to them; tell Montgomery they can keep bombing and I’m going to stand up to them. If I had to die tomorrow morning I would die happy because I’ve been to the mountaintop and I’ve seen the promised land and it’s going to be here in Montgomery.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“I think I received a new understanding of the meaning of suffering,” he wrote Harold DeWolf, “and I came away more convinced than ever before that unearned suffering is redemptive.” The imprisonment had not been pleasant, but he did feel that his faith had benefited from the experience.20”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“Mass action by everyday black people was just as powerful a tool for social change as the lawsuit, and maybe more so. If”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“essence of nonviolence was a refusal to retaliate against evil, a refusal based on the realization that “the law of retaliation is the law of the multiplication of evil.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“King told the student leaders not to forget that the struggle was justice versus injustice, not black versus white, and reminded them always to be open to compromise with local whites.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“Coretta told Daddy King of Kennedy’s phone call as they prepared to see Morris Abram. King, Sr., was ecstatic, and said that this was enough to shift his traditionally Republican presidential preference and vote instead for Kennedy, the man who had called his daughter-in-law.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“What is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, fed, and sustained by students.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“first two days of Montgomery’s integrated bus service were without incident. Then, at 1:30 A.M. on Sunday morning, December 23, a shotgun blast ripped through the front door of King’s home. The floodlights were on, but no watchman was present. King, Coretta, and Yoki were asleep, and no one was injured. King chose not to call the police, but he did announce the incident to his Dexter congregation later that morning. “It may be that some of us may have to die,” he solemnly remarked. That evening, at a mass meeting, he declared that “I would like to tell whoever did it that it won’t do any good to kill me”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“how valuable mass nonviolent resistance could be. The real goal, however, was not to defeat the white man, but “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority.… The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community” where all men would treat each other as brothers and equals. “There are great resources of goodwill in the southern white man that we must somehow tap,” King asserted, and we must work to “speed up the coming of the inevitable.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“on November 1 he issued a statement that stopped just short of an endorsement. “I want to make it palpably clear,” King said, “that I am deeply grateful to Senator Kennedy for the genuine concern he expressed.… [He] exhibited moral courage of a high order.” In private, he added that the contrast between Kennedy’s call and Nixon’s inaction was very real to him. Even though Nixon had known him longer, he had done nothing. “I really considered him a moral coward,” King remarked.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“We must understand,” Rustin wrote, “that our refusal to accept jim crow in specific areas challenges the entire social, political and economic order that has kept us second class citizens.… Those who oppose us, understand this.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“A Springfield “horseshoe” was an often grotesque open-faced sandwich in which a piece of meat was covered first with french fries and then with a cheeselike sauce. Visitors knowledgeable enough to avoid the local delicacy felt rightfully proud. The statement that Springfield was a city of “bad hotels and worse food” was perhaps apocryphal, but there was no shortage of bars, because drinking was state politicos’ top recreational activity.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“the Negro must come to the point of refusing to cooperate with evil,” but without ever hating the evildoers. “I have no malice toward anyone, not even the white policeman who almost broke my arm, who choked and kicked me. Let there be no malice among you.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“The time had come, King said, to “move from protest to reconciliation.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“Barack confessed that “during the course of campaigning” “sometimes you lose” your “core truthfulness” and “it becomes a performance”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“Gay liberation was not part of the Comparative Politics course, but Goldyn drew “a good-sized crowd” one evening during that term when he spoke on gay activism, and a column he wrote for the student newspaper ended by declaring that “the point of liberation, sexual or otherwise, is to rewrite the rules.” Goldyn made a huge impact on Barry Obama.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“money is the original sin in politics and I am not sinless.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it … I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, ‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.’ Then it happened: And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’… I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. That experience gave King a new strength and courage.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“Only an extreme control freak would withhold his academic transcripts from public view simply so as to avoid any public discussion of what possible ideological influence either Walder’s impressive reading list or Len Davis’s teaching about the political uses of fiction might have had upon an intellectually hungry twenty-one-year-old mind.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“As a prominent African American, Chicago-based theologian who worshiped in the same church later emphasized, above all else, including color, complexion, and race, first and foremost Barack “Obama is Hawaiian.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“failure to respect the dignity and worth of all human personality.”
― David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warned that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality,”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“Maya Soetoro-Ng declined comment to a reporter, but a family friend explained that “she was furious” over Barack’s comments about their grandmother. His characterization of her “seemed completely gratuitous, even cruel,” one critic rightly thought, and one of the late Stanley Dunham’s close friends acidly remarked, “I have a far better opinion of both Stan and Madelyn than I have heard from Barry’s speeches.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“young Barack spent most of his time with his fit and youthful forty-five-year-old grandfather.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President

“Obama also realized that the beer drinking, pot smoking, and cocaine snorting that Oxy, like Punahou, offered him, and that had cemented his reputation as “a hard-core party animal” to some friends, was incompatible with any self-transformation into a more serious student and person.”
― David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – The Definitive Biography of the Formative Years and Forces Behind the 44th President