What happened after World War I was disgraceful. Most veterans, like my great-uncle, were squashed back into place. Congress couldn't pass an anti-lynching bill. The World War II generation, though, wasn't going to take it.
Darryl PinckneyThe rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.
Darryl PinckneyWhen you're writing fiction it's a heightened voice. You're trying to cast a spell, which isn't the same thing as trying to cast someone into it. You are creating a reality but it's a different sort of performance.
Darryl PinckneyIn her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.
Darryl PinckneyThere's a class divide in black America that doesn't seem to trouble black Americans so much, but whites use it and exploit it. The progress of a few is allowed to stand for the progress of everyone. We can't afford that kind of disaffection at the moment.
Darryl PinckneyObama can't be everything to everyone. He changed. He did. I never thought I'd hear Obama say, "Let's go back to nuclear arms," but he did. In the meantime, the clear and present danger is the Republicans in the Senate. A lot of politics isn't heroic, it's as day-to-day as our lives themselves. We always want to make the Byronic choices, but Byron himself was not Byronic all the time either.
Darryl Pinckney