In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak.

But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

I believe that love is the single, true prosperity of any moment.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.