“Somebody told a lie one day.”…Walk good. 28all. Eya. *LS, WC*

The Warm-Up: 

“The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals…We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.” ~Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., January-February 1947. The Purpose of Education. Atlanta, GA.

The Core: 

“If you run after your destiny you will automatically distance yourself from your history.” ~Bishop T.D. Jakes

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” ~Malcolm X

“Some people are carrying worlds on their shoulders and invisible wounds on their backs. Be careful about assuming you know someone’s story.” ~Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” ~James A. Baldwin, A Talk to Teachers, 1963.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with the pain.” ~James Baldwin

‪“Lord, help me to accept my tools. However dull they are, help me to accept them. And then Lord, after I have accepted my tools, then help me to set out and do what I can do with my tools.” ~Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“If people think they just walked out and caught racism, they may feel no responsibility for ridding themselves and society of it. It must be unlearned. People who have embraced it must renounce it…Don’t act like everyone loved my father. He was assassinated. A 1967 poll reflected that he was one of the most hated men in America. Most hated. Many who quote him now and evoke him to deter justice today would likely hate, and may already hate, the authentic King.” ~Bernice King

“Here is a man consciously in the world. He looks, he sees, he executes, he deplores. He capsulizes! He magnifies! He knows that one of the ingredients of human Existence is infamy, that another is cold cruelty, That another is weakness. But he is also aware of positives—and of nuances That whisper of potential. He is a skillful wielder of language. He uses language with sensitive enjoyment, with Canny respect. Yearn Hong Choi is a new influencer and enhancer.” ~Gwendolyn Brooks, Yearn Hong Choi

“We know that the letters of the alphabet are neutral and meaningless until they are combined to make a word which itself has no significance until it is inserted into a sentence and interpreted by those who speak it. In the same way that black and white were applied to people who were literally neither, but rather gradations of brown and beige and ivory, the caste system sets people at poles from one another and attaches meaning to the extremes, and to gradations in between, and then reinforces those meanings, replicated them in the roles each caste was and is assigned and permitted or required to perform.” ~Isabel Wilkerson, Caste

“Forgiveness condones nothing, but it does cast off the chains of anger, judgement, resentment, denial, and pain that choke growth. In this way, it allows for life, for freedom. So that’s what’s at stake when it comes to forgiveness: freedom. With this freedom we can feel better, be better, and choose better next time…For the first time in my life, I was dedicated to self-care in an unrepentant way. I was dedicated to loving myself so fully that the natural response was also to love unconditionally any authenticity I found in others. In this, too, was the freedom of knowing that another person’s journey had little to do with my own.” ~Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking

“Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so, in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.” ~Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Other America” speech delivered in 1967 at Stanford University

Last Set: 

“I don’t know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes—it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, ‘Well, if I’d known better I’d have done better,’ that’s all. So, you say to people who you think you may have injured, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then you say to yourself, ‘I’m sorry.’ If we all hold on to the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that’s rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don’t have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.” ~Maya Angelou