Stephen Williams

“The people there had lived their little passage of time in this world, had become what they became, and now could be changed only by forgiveness and mercy. The misled, the disappointed, the sinners of all the sins, the hopeful, the faithful, the loving, the doubtful, the desperate, the grieved and the comforted, the young and the old, the bad and the good—all, sufferers unto death, had lain down there together. Some were there who had served the community better by dying than by living. Why I should have felt tender toward them all was not clear to me, but I did.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States—from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later—riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward the scapegoats of their condition. Nearly every big northern city experienced one or more during the twentieth century.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“The colored people [in Atlanta] drew a fence around themselves and manufactured a world so grand they told themselves they didn't want whatever Jim Crow was keeping from them.

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― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“That if they could not have a fierce joy in their struggle, then they were not truly free but governed by fear and doubt.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Strange Bird: A Borne Story