In 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 PinckneyMarriage equality is a very middle-class issue and voting rights is a very working-class issue. If you do not vote, who are you speaking for? Who will be the next Fannie Lou Hamer? If not you or someone you know, then who?
Darryl PinckneyIf your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away.
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 PinckneyI think that the Vietnam War era is important because we tend not to want to revisit it. For black people, there was the temptation of disaffection. People looked for alternative ways to express themselves personally and politically, people doubted the system, and there was the terrible kind of division in black America between a radical leadership and a much older, compromising leadership.
Darryl Pinckney