Robin D.G. Kelley > Quotes > Quote > Billy liked it

“Dr. King constantly warned us that we would not be able to build a truly liberatory movement without the “strength to love.” In his 1963 book of the same title, he wrote: We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but still we are confined in an oppressive prison of segregation and discrimination. Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our personalities…. To guard ourselves from bitterness, we need the vision to see in this generation’s ordeals the opportunity to transfigure both ourselves and American society. Our present suffering and our nonviolent struggle to be free may well offer to Western civilization the kind of spiritual dynamic so desperately needed for survival.”
― Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination