Quote For The Day

"In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny, not dead but living yet and powerful, the beast in our jungle of statistics.  It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling air: in any drawing room at such a gathering the beast may spring, filling the air with flying things and an enenlightened wailing. Whereever the problem touches there is confusion, there is danger. Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable.  It is a sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead: it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. It is not a question of memory.  Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him," – James Baldwin, "Many Thousands Gone," 1955.