“If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.”

“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...”

“The Lord works through deeply flawed people, since He made so few of the other kind.”

“In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus.”

“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 numb...”

“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 loya...”

“Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal?”

“Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal?”

“If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant...”

“The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvat...”