Timothy B. Tyson > Quotes

“If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“The Lord works through deeply flawed people, since He made so few of the other kind.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“It baffles me that people think that obliterating the past will save them from its consequences, as if throwing away the empty cake plate would help you lose weight.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.”5”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Unjust social orders do no fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor, though such appeals may be an important element; history teaches us that they fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down. Rarely do such revolutions emerge in a neat and morally pristine process.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Every minister worthy of the name has to walk the line between prophetic vision and spiritual sustenance, between telling people the comforting things they want to hear and challenging them with the difficult things they need to hear. In Oxford, Daddy began to feel as though all the members wanted him to do was to marry them and bury them and stay away from their souls.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“In politics, everyone regards themselves as a moderate, because they know some other sumbitch who's twice as crazy as they are.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“What the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don’t understand is how deeply the past holds the future in its grip—even, and perhaps especially, when it remains unacknowledged.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive and probably won’t.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“Most of us would rather claim to have always been perfect that admit how much we have grown.”
― Timothy B. Tyson

“Oxford was as drenched in Dixie as we were, just about as Southern a town as you would ever hope to find, which generally was a good thing, because that meant that the weather was nice, except when it was hot enough to fry pork chops on the pavement, and the food was delicious, though it would thicken the walls of your arteries and kill you deader than Stonewall Jackson, and the people were big hearted and friendly, though it was not the hardest place in the world to get murdered for having bad manners. Even our main crop could kill you.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Some things are worse than death... If a man lives, he must still live with himself.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“We want to transcend our history without actually confronting it. We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Anyone intent on moral clarity might want to find another book and, in fact, might not want to go anywhere near the enduring chasm of race in the United States.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend. In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. writes that his worst enemies are not the members of Citizens’ Councils or the Ku Klux Klan but “the white moderate” who claims to support the goals of the movement but deplores its methods of protest and deprecates its timetable for change: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”10”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“Emmett Till's death was an extreme example of the logic of America's national racial caste system. To look beneath the surface of these facts is to ask ourselves what our relationship is today to the legacies of that caste system - legacies that still end the lives of young African Americans for no reason other than the color of their American skin and the content of our national character. Recall that Faulkner, asked to comment on the Till case when he was sober, responded, 'If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't.' Ask yourself whether America's predicament is really so different now.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“Tobacco put food on our tables, steeples on our churches, stains on our fingers, spots on our lungs, and contradictions in our hearts.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“The ruthless attack inflicted injuries almost certain to be fatal. They reveal a breathtaking level of savagery, a brutality that cannot be explained without considering rabid homicidal intent or a rage utterly beyond control. Affronted white supremacy drove every blow.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“Racism was an important moral issue, one that the church needed to confront. Putting a black man in a position of honor and authority was a good thing, and if there was controversy over it, that was not a bad thing thing, either. People needed to work through these things, and not just in the abstract.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin instructs, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”24”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“The world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain…”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“The federal government was entirely complicit. When President Roosevelt passed the Social Security Act of 1935, Southern conservatives and their Northern Republican allies forced the New Deal legislation to exclude domestic workers and farmworkers from all of its employment provisions. That shielded”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“When we said we were going to do something "directly," which is pronounced "dreckly," we meant that we were going to get to it sooner or later, one of these days, maybe never, and please don't ask again.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam’s and Bryant’s acquittals: “The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don’t want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till