Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 203 of 288 · 20 per page

• From The Art of Memoir

  Speak, Memory (1951), and Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). Nabokov was publishing excerpts in France starting in 1936, and McCarthy in the New Yorker in 1946, but for my money, it was Wright who first won an audience in book length without being wildly famous first. Wright started shaping the form as we think of it today. (The next generation featured Maya Angelou and Frank Conroy, who no doubt learned from the aforementioned first- timers.) Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery had previously been a national best seller, but Washington had been a major figure before. Wright was the first African American to ride from oblivion onto the New York Times best-seller list. Not the last, though, for Malcolm X (1965) and Angelou (1969) bobbed in his wake. As a little white girl in segregated Texas, I found such books showed me racism as we were all still gagging on it. Today I even wonder if those memoirs didn’t partly fuel the civil rights movement. Without them, black experience would’ve been rendered solely in sociopolitical speak. Wright’s refusal to shuffle Uncle Tom–like down the page trying to cull favor was a revolutionary act at his time in history, and it reads as true in that context. Of course, his voice can also transport with its poetry: Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly released their coded meanings. There was the wonder I felt when I first saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay. There was the delight I caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the sun to the bright horizon. But such tender moments stand in stark relief to the brutal facts of the Jim Crow South and segregated Chicago. He starts off Black Boy with a distracted, aimless rage; deciding to set the family house on fire: My idea was growing, blooming. Now I was wondering just how the long fluffy white curtains would look if I lit a bunch of [broom] straws on fire and held it under them. Would I try it? Sure.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Athens, partly through its ancient renown and its historical traditions, partly by excellent teachers of philosophy and eloquence, Sophists, as they were called in an honorable sense, among whom Himerius and Proaeresius were at that time specially conspicuous, was still drawing a multitude of students from all quarters of Greece, and even from the remote provinces of Asia. Every Sophist had his own school and party, which was attached to him with incredible zeal, and endeavored to gain every newly arriving student to its master. In these efforts, as well as in the frequent literary contests and debates of the various schools among themselves, there was not seldom much rude and wild behavior. To youth who were not yet firmly grounded in Christianity, residence in Athens, and occupation with the ancient classics, were full of temptation, and might easily kindle an enthusiasm for heathenism, which, however, had already lost its vitality, and was upheld solely by the artificial means of magic, theurgy, and an obscure mysticism.1941 Basil and Gregory remained steadfast, and no poetical or rhetorical glitter could fade the impressions of a pious training. Gregory says of their studies in Athens, in his forty-third Oration:1942 "We knew only two streets of the city, the first and the more excellent one to the churches, and to the ministers of the altar; the other, which, however, we did not so highly esteem, to the public schools and to the teachers of the sciences. The streets to the theatres, games, and places of unholy amusements, we left to others. Our holiness was our great concern; our sole aim was to be called and to be Christians. In this we placed our whole glory."1943 In a later oration on classic studies Basil encourages them, but admonishes that they should be pursued with caution, and with constant regard to the great Christian purpose of eternal life, to which all earthly objects and attainments are as shadows and dreams to reality. In plucking the rose one should beware of the thorns, and, like the bee, should not only delight himself with the color and the fragrance, but also gain useful honey from the flower.1944 The intimate friendship of Basil and Gregory, lasting from fresh, enthusiastic youth till death, resting on an identity of spiritual and moral aims, and sanctified by Christian piety, is a lovely and engaging chapter in the history of the fathers, and justifies a brief episode in a field not yet entered by any church historian.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Embracing the élite of three nations, melted into one whole by the spirit of one man, it continues in the midst of mighty and bitter foes, without any external support, simply through its moral force. It has no territory, no army, no treasures, no temporal, no material resources. There it stands, a city of the spirit, built of Christian stoicism on the rock of predestination." § 161. The Academy of Geneva. The High School of Reformed Theology. I. Calvin: Leges Academiae Genevensis, or L’Ordre du Collège de Genève, first published in Latin and French. Geneva, 1559. Republished by Charles Le Fort, professor of law at Geneva, on the third centennial of the founding of the Academy, June 5, 1859, and in Opera, X. 65–90. II. Berthault: Mathurin Cordier. L’enseignement chez les premiers Calvinistes. Paris, 1876 (85 pp.).—Massebieau: Les colloques scolaires du seizième siècle et leurs auteurs. Paris, 1878.—Amiel et Bouvier: L’enseignement superieur à Genève depuis la fondation de l’académie jusqu’à 1876. Gen., 1878. Comp. Henry, III. 386 sqq.; Stähelin, II. 487–498; Gaberel, II. 109 sqq.; Buisson: Séb. Castellion (Paris, 1892), I. 121–151. One of the most important institutions of Geneva which strengthened the Reformed religion at home, and extended it abroad, is the Academy founded by Calvin. Knowing that the ignorance of the Roman priesthood was a source of much superstition and corruption, he labored zealously for the education of the ministry and the whole people, and secured the best teachers, as Cordier, Saunier, Castellio, and Beza. There was a college in Geneva, since 1428, called after its founder "College Versonnex," for the training of the clergy; but it had fallen into decay, and was reorganized after Calvin’s return in 1541. Tuition was free. To avoid overcrowding and to bring the facilities of education within the reach of every youth, four elementary schools were established for each of the four quarters of the city. At first a small fee was charged, but it was abolished by the council after 1571, at the request of Beza. A much larger attendance was the effect. Calvin is sometimes called the founder of the common school system. He wished to establish a full university with four faculties, but the limited means of the little Republic would not permit that; so he confined himself to an Academy. He himself collected for it from house to house 10,024 gold guilders, a very large sum for that time. Several foreign residents contributed liberally: Carraccioli, 2954; Pierre Orsières, 312; Matthieu de la Roche, 260 guilders. Of the native Genevese, Bonivard, the old champion of liberty, bequeathed his whole fortune to the institution.1227 The Council put up a commodious building. Calvin drew up the programme of studies and the academic statutes, which, after careful examination, were unanimously approved.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In the course of this treatment no less than sixty different passages from the Canticles are applied to Mary. Albert leaves her crowned at her assumption in the heavens. One of the questions this indefatigable theologian pursued with consequential precision was Eve’s conception before she sinned. As for the ecclesiastical organization of the Middle Ages, the pope is to Albert God’s viceregent, vested with plenary power.1494 Albert astounds us by the industry and extent of his theological thought and labor and the versatility of his mind. Like all the Schoolmen he sought to exhaust the topics he discusses, and looks at them in every conceivable aspect. There is often something chaotic in his presentation of a theme, but he is nevertheless wonderfully stimulating. It remained for Albert’s greater pupil, Thomas Aquinas, to bring a clearness and succinctness to the statement of theological problems, theretofore unreached. Albert treated them with the insatiable curiosity of the student, the profundity of the philosopher, and the attainments of a widely read scholar. Thomas added the skill of the dialectic artist and a pronounced practical and ethical purpose. § 108 Thomas Aquinas. Literature: I. Works.—U. Chevalier: Répertoire under Thomas Aq., pp. 1200–1206, and Supplem., pp. 2823–2827. — S. Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici opera omnia, jussu impensaque Leonis XIII., P. M., edita, Romae ex typographia polyglotta S. C. de Propaganda Fide, vols. 1–11, 1882–1902, to be completed in 25 vols. For this edition, called from Leo’s patronage editio Leonina, a papal appropriation has been made of 300,000 lire. See vol. I., p. xxv.—Older edd., Rome, 1570, 18 vols. by order of Pius V., and Venice, 1592–1594; Antwerp, by C. Morelles, 1612 sqq., 18 vols.; Paris, 1660, 23 vols.; Venice, 1786–1790, 28 vols.; with 30 dissertations by B. M. de Rubeis, Naples, 1846–1848, 19 vols.; Parma, 1852 sqq.; Paris, 1871—1880, 33 vols. by Fretté and Maré.—The Summa theologica has been often separately published as by Migne, 4 vols. Paris, 1841, 1864; *Drioux, 15 vols. Paris, 1853–1856; with French trans., and 8 vols. Paris, 1885. Among the very numerous commentators of the Summa are Cajetan, d. 1534, given in the Leonine ed., Melchior Canus, d. 1560, Dominicus Soto, d. 1560, Medina, d. 1580, Bannez, d. 1604, Xantes Moriales, d. 1666, Mauritius de Gregorii, d. 1666, all Dominicans; Vasquez, d. 1604, Suarez, d. 1617, Jesuits. The most prolix commentaries are by barefooted Carmelites of Spain, viz. the cursus theologicus of Salamanca, 19 vols. repub. at Venice, 1677 sqq., and the Disputationes collegii complutensis at Alcala in 4 vols. repub. at Lyons, 1667 sqq. —See Werner: D. hl. Thomas, I. 885 sqq.—P. A. Uccelli’s ed. of the contra Gentiles, Rome, 1878, from autograph MSS. in the Vatican, contains a facsimile of Thomas’ handwriting which is almost illegible.—Engl. trans. of the Aurea Catena, Oxford, 1865, 6 vols., and the Ethics by J. Rickaby, N. Y., 1896.—Fr. Satolli, in Summam Theol. d. Th. Aq. praelectiones, Milan, 1884–1888.—L. Janssen: Summa Theol. ad modum commentarii in Aquinatis Summam praesentis aevi studii aptatam, Freib.

• From My People (2022)

  Wilson, who has a twenty-four-year-old son, Robert 3d, a junior at Harvard Law School, is no feminist; she feels that the fact she is a woman at the top of an organization that has made few concessions to the women’s movement is “irrelevant and immaterial. “Sex and race are accidents of birth,” she said. “I take them for granted.” Although she hopes to broaden the involvement of young people in the NAACP, she said yesterday that she contemplated no major change in the sixty-five-year-old organization’s direction. “We have to have an integrated society,” she said at her first news conference. “That’s what this country is all about.” Poets Extol a Sister’s Unfettered SoulThe New York Times NOVEMBER 9, 1973 JACKSON, Miss.—To mark the two hundredth birthday of the first book published by a black living in America, twenty black women poets from all over the country gathered here this week to celebrate the legacy of its author, Phillis Wheatley, a “pretty little slave girl” who managed at seventeen to become a poet. The four-day festival at Jackson State College here, on whose campus three years ago two students were killed during a fracas involving policemen, saw the unveiling of a bronze sculpture of Miss Wheatley by Elizabeth Catlett, panels on her work, poetry-reading sessions, and a drama by Vinie Burrows about aspects of the poet’s life. The festival ended Wednesday with the examination as a public policy issue of the exclusion of black women from the textbooks of America. The poets raised many questions, among them the crucial one of whether they as black poets are as stymied in reaching their full potential as they felt Phillis Wheatley was. Miss Wheatley, born in Senegal about 1754 and later brought to America and sold to John Wheatley, a Boston merchant, learned to read and write in eighteen months. In her lifetime, she gained recognition for her poems and broadsides on religion, on America, on death, and on politics and freedom. Her only book, celebrated this week, is called Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral , published first in England in 1773. An excerpt from “To the Right Honorable William, of Dartmouth,” goes: . . . I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was the soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d this babe belov’d. Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway? The poets, whose themes range from a celebration of black liberation and the politics of confrontation, included such well-known younger poets as Nikki Giovanni and emerging ones such as Malaika Ayo Wangara (Joyce Whitsitt Lawrence), a Pan-Africanist from Detroit. And there were the pioneering ones like Margaret Danner, Margaret G.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Before we take leave of this imposing character, and of the period of church history in which he shines as the brightest star, we must add some observations respecting the influence of Augustine on the world since his time, and his position with reference to the great antagonism of Catholicism and Protestantism. All the church fathers are, indeed, the common inheritance of both parties; but no other of them has produced so permanent effects on both, and no other stands in so high regard with both, as Augustine. Upon the Greek church alone has he exercised little or no influence; for this church stopped with the undeveloped synergistic anthropology of the previous age.2196 1. Augustine, in the first place, contributed much to the development of the doctrinal basis which Catholicism and Protestantism hold in common against such radical heresies of antiquity, as Manichaeism, Arianism, and Pelagianism. In all these great intellectual conflicts he was in general the champion of the cause of Christian truth against dangerous errors. Through his influence the canon of Holy Scripture (including, indeed, the Old Testament Apocrypha) was fixed in its present form by the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397). He conquered the Manichaean dualism, hylozoism, and fatalism, and saved the biblical idea of God and of creation and the biblical doctrine of the nature of sin and its origin in the free will of man. He developed the Nicene dogma of the Trinity, completed it by the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Ghost, and gave it the form in which it has ever since prevailed in the West, and in which it received classical expression from his school in the Athanasian Creed. In Christology, on the contrary, he added nothing, and he died shortly before the great Christological conflicts opened, which reached their ecumenical settlement at the council of Chalcedon, twenty years after his death. Yet he anticipated Leo in giving currency in the West to the important formula: "Two natures in one person."2197

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He says in the Preface to these sermons: "Now, my dear Italy, I can no more speak to you from mouth to mouth; but I will write to you in thine own language, that everybody may understand me. My comfort is that Christ so willed it, that, laying aside all earthly considerations, I may regard only the truth. And as the justification of the sinner by Christ is the beginning of the Christian life, let us begin with it in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." His sermons are evangelical, and show a mystical tendency, as we might expect from a disciple of Valdes. He lays much stress on the vital union of the soul with Christ by faith and love. He teaches a free salvation by the sole merits of Christ, and the Calvinistic doctrine of sovereign election, but without the negative inference of reprobation. He wrote also a popular, paraphrastic commentary on his favorite Epistle to the Romans (1545), which was translated into Latin and German. Afterwards, he published sermons on the Epistle to the Galatians, which were printed at Augsburg, 1546. He lived on good terms with Calvin, who distrusted the Italians, but after careful inquiry was favorably impressed with Ochino’s "eminent learning and exemplary life."939 He mentions him first in a letter to Viret (September, 1542) as a venerable refugee, who lived in Geneva at his own expense, and promised to be of great service if he could learn French.940 In a letter to Melanchthon (Feb. 14, 1543), he calls him an "eminent and excellent man, who has occasioned no little stir in Italy by his departure."941 Two years afterwards (Aug. 15, 1545), he recommended him to Myconius of Basel as "deserving of high esteem everywhere."942 Ochino associated at Basel with Castellio, and employed him in the translation of his works from the Italian. This connection may have shaken his confidence in the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and free-will. Ochino in Germany. He labored for some time as preacher and author in Strassburg, where he met his old friend Peter Martyr, and in Augsburg, where he received from the city council a regular salary of two hundred guilders as preacher among the foreigners. This was his first regular settlement after he had left Italy. At Augsburg he lived with his brother-in-law and sister. He seems to have married at that time, if not earlier.943 Ochino in England. After his victory over the Smalkaldian League, the Emperor Charles V. held a triumphant entry in Augsburg, Jan. 23, 1547, and demanded the surrender of the Apostate monk, whose powerful voice he had heard from the pulpit at Naples eleven years before. The magistrates enabled Ochino to escape in the night. He fled to Zürich, where he accidentally met Calvin, who arrived there on the same day. From Zürich he went to Basel.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Paul very aptly, though only incidentally, quotes three times from Greek poets, not only a proverbial maxim from Menander,349 and a hexameter from Epimenides,350 which may have passed into common use, but also a half-hexameter with a connecting particle, which he must have read in the tedious astronomical poem of his countryman, Aratus (about b.c. 270), or in the sublime hymn of Cleanthes to Jupiter, in both of which the passage occurs.351 He borrows some of his favorite metaphors from the Grecian games; he disputed with Greek philosophers of different schools and addressed them from the Areopagus with consummate wisdom and adaptation to the situation; some suppose that he alludes even to the terminology of the Stoic philosophy when he speaks of the "rudiments" or "elements of the world."352 He handles the Greek language, not indeed with classical purity and elegance, yet with an almost creative vigor, transforming it into an obedient organ of new ideas, and pressing into his service the oxymoron, the paronomasia, the litotes, and other rhetorical figures.353 Yet all this does by no means prove a regular study or extensive knowledge of Greek literature, but is due in part to native genius. His more than Attic urbanity and gentlemanly refinement which breathe in his Epistles to Philemon and the Philippians, must be traced to the influence of Christianity rather than his intercourse with accomplished Greeks. His Hellenic learning seems to have been only casual, incidental, and altogether subordinate to his great aim. In this respect he differed widely from the learned Josephus, who affected Attic purity of style, and from Philo, who allowed the revealed truth of the Mosaic religion to be controlled, obscured, and perverted by Hellenic philosophy. Philo idealized and explained away the Old Testament by allegorical impositions which he substituted for grammatical expositions; Paul spiritualized the Old Testament and drew out its deepest meaning. Philo’s Judaism evaporated in speculative abstractions, Paul’s Judaism was elevated and transformed into Christian realities. His Zeal for Judaism. Saul was a Pharisee of the strictest sect, not indeed of the hypocritical type, so witheringly rebuked by our Saviour, but of the honest, truth-loving and truth-seeking sort, like that of Nicodemus and Gamaliel. His very fanaticism in persecution arose from the intensity of his conviction and his zeal for the religion of his fathers. He persecuted in ignorance, and that diminished, though it did not abolish, his guilt. He probably never saw or heard Jesus until he appeared to him at Damascus. He may have been at Tarsus at the time of the crucifixion and resurrection.354 But with his Pharisaic education he regarded Jesus of Nazareth, like his teachers, as a false Messiah, a rebel, a blasphemer, who was justly condemned to death. And he acted according to his conviction. He took the most prominent part in the persecution of Stephen and delighted in his death.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  renowned Gamaliel, surnamed "the Glory of the Law." He could address the Greeks in their own beautiful tongue and with the convincing force of their logic. Clothed with the dignity and majesty of the Roman people, he could travel safely over the whole empire with the proud watchword: Civis Romanus sum. This providential outfit for his future work made him for a while the most dangerous enemy of Christianity, but after his conversion its most useful promoter. The weapons of destruction were turned into weapons of construction. The engine was reversed, and the direction changed; but it remained the same engine, and its power was increased under the new inspiration. The intellectual and moral endowment of Saul was of the highest order. The sharpest thinking was blended with the tenderest feeling, the deepest mind with the strongest will. He had Semitic fervor, Greek versatility, and Roman energy. Whatever he was, he was with his whole soul. He was totus in illis, a man of one idea and of one purpose, first as a Jew, then as a Christian. His nature was martial and heroic. Fear was unknown to him—except the fear of God, which made him fearless of man. When yet a youth, he had risen to high eminence; and had he remained a Jew, he might have become a greater Rabbi than even Hillel or Gamaliel, as he surpassed them both in original genius and fertility of thought. Paul was the only scholar among the apostles. He never displays his learning, considering it of no account as compared with the excellency of the knowledge of Christ, for whom he suffered the loss of all things,344 but he could not conceal it, and turned it to the best use after his conversion. Peter and John had natural genius, but no scholastic education; Paul had both, and thus became the founder of Christian theology and philosophy. His Education. His training was thoroughly Jewish, rooted and grounded in the Scriptures of the Old Covenant, and those traditions of the elders which culminated in the Talmud.345 He knew the Hebrew and Greek Bible almost by heart.

• From My People (2022)

  My father’s mother—my grandmother, Alberta Hunter—was a mighty crafter of the mission. Every day at noon she walked the few feet from the parsonage, the preacher’s home, to pray in the church. Each day, despite my tomboyish efforts to elude her, she would eventually find me and make me learn a Bible verse. Her favorite was the 23rd Psalm, with its lines, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Thy rod and thy staff they will comfort me all the days of my life.” As a nineteen-year-old entering under court order the previously all-white University of Georgia, I was confronted by a mob of people screaming and throwing rocks at my dormitory window and shouting for me to leave. They saw only their institution of white privilege, but I was shielded by my armor. And as I read about twenty-six-year-old Tywanza Sanders, who last week in Charleston threw his body onto Susie Jackson, his eighty-seven-year-old aunt, to shield her from the demented assailant’s bullets, I wondered if he, too, had been able to do that because he was clad in that moral armor, taught him during a Bible class at Mother Emanuel. It seemed so to me. And I hope as the victims perished, they felt the comfort of the rod and the staff they had been taught protected them. Today, as I reach back to my history in the AME Church, I understand the forgiveness by those who have lost loved ones. It’s about enveloping themselves in the armor of their values to heal the hurt in their own souls, as Nelson Mandela did when he forgave those who had imprisoned him for twenty-seven years and waged a brutal, vicious war on his people. But that kind of forgiveness doesn’t preclude seeking justice. As a child of the AME Church, I am sure that those who are in pain in Charleston will use their tears today and in the days to come to polish their armor so that they, like those of us who mourn with them, can endure and prosper like so many generations before. Especially crucial are those teaching lessons in Bible study. They are needed to help America meet its most enduring challenge: racism and its role in failing to help America keep its promise to all its citizens whose lives matter. Lifting My VoiceAARP Magazine SEPTEMBER/ OCTOBER 2014 When I was a little girl, I sat at my grandmother’s knee while she read the newspaper. Pigtailed and proper, I’d wait patiently until she finished and handed me the comic strips. My favorite was the one about the dashing blue-eyed redhead, Brenda Starr, reporter for the New York Flash . I loved Starr’s life of adventure and romance—the fearless way she traveled the world, the clever way she figured things out. I dreamed of being a reporter like Brenda Starr, and one day told my mother so. She didn’t flinch.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The Count then showed me to my room which adjoined the Countess' and he showed me as well that the entirety of this apartment, closed by stout doors and double grilled at every window, left no hope of escape. "And here you have a terrace," Monsieur de Gernande went on, leading me out into a little garden on a level with the apartment, "but its elevation above the ground ought not, I believe, give you the idea of measuring the walls; the Countess is permitted to take fresh air out here whenever she wishes, you will keep her company... adieu." I returned to my mistress and, as at first we spent a few moments examining one another without speaking, I obtained a good picture of her Ä but let me paint it for you. Madame de Gernande, aged nineteen and a half, had the most lovely, the most noble, the most majestic figure one could hope to see, not one of her gestures, not a single movement was without gracefulness, not one of her glances lacked depth of sentiment: nothing could equal the expression of her eyes, which were a beautiful dark brown although her hair was blond; but a certain languor, a lassitude entailed by her misfortunes, dimmed their e'clat, and thereby rendered them a thousand times more interesting; her skin was very fair, her hair very rich; her mouth was very small, perhaps too small, and I was little surprised to find this defect in her: 'twas a pretty rose not yet in full bloom; but teeth so white... lips of a vermillion... one might have said Love had colored them with tints borrowed from the goddess of flowers; her nose was aquiline, straight, delicately modeled; upon her brow curved two ebony eyebrows; a perfectly lovely chin; a visage, in one word, of the finest oval shape, over whose entirety reigned a kind of attractiveness, a naivete, an openness which might well have made one take this adorable face for an angelic rather than mortal physiognomy.

• From My People (2022)

  I have had to close my business, to abandon my profession, and live in poverty and misery, as many of my people are doing. He was posing as a chauffeur when he was finally caught and arrested (thanks, it is widely believed, to information that the CIA or MI6 intelligence agents gave to South African authorities). In court, Mandela defiantly wore the traditional outfit of a Xhosa chief—a leopard-skin kaross with one bare shoulder exposed, and beads around his neck. This time, he was charged with inciting workers to strike and with leaving the country illegally. He was faithful to his movement marriage. He accused the government of “behav[ing] in a way no civilized government should dare behave when faced with a peaceful, disciplined, sensible, and democratic expression of the views of its own population.” The South African political journalist Max du Preez wrote, of Mandela’s goodbye to Winnie, “There were no tears, no clinging to each other; he gave her advice—almost like a father figure—on how to conduct herself in his absence, and gave her a letter of love and encouragement written earlier.” Seven months later, he and nine others were brought back to court, this time charged under the all-encompassing Suppression of Communism Act, as well as the Sabotage Act, in what became known as the Rivonia Trial. They faced the death penalty. Mandela, known as Accused No. 1, was undeterred. Given a chance to address the court, he spoke for four hours, talking passionately about the desire of the black majority to have “a just share in the whole of South Africa,” as well as “equal political rights.” He insisted that “the violence we chose to adopt was not terrorism,” and that the ANC was committed to “nonviolence and negotiations.” And then he spoke words that captured the attention not only of those in the courtroom but of people all over the world. They remain to this day among his most memorable—and are the only words of his captured on audio for almost three decades: During my lifetime, I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. The sentence was not death but life in prison. For the next two and a half decades, Mandela was the invisible man. He and other political prisoners were first confined on Robben Island, two square miles of land surrounded by the waters off Cape Town. While they managed to create an atmosphere that was referred to as Mandela University, where the younger prisoners were encouraged to study, prison life took its toll.

• From My People (2022)

  “There are many barriers people try to break down,” he told an audience (which had also been a Columbia audience) when the tape was made, in 1964. “I try to do it with poetry.” Remembering John Lewis and the Significance of Freedom RidesThe Palm Beach Post AUGUST 2, 2020 Being only two years younger than John Lewis, even now I well remember his early years when he took the first blow for freedom, stepping off a bus during an effort to test the Supreme Court’s ruling against segregation on interstate bus routes and toilets. It was a case that came to be known as the Boynton decision, bearing the name of Bruce Boynton, a Black college student discriminated against on an interstate bus route. There was no social media and only three television networks, none with any people of color. But that seminal moment in our history lit up the country and the world to the challenges America faced on the road to freedom and justice for all, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin. And before that journey began, John and a group of thirteen Blacks and whites signed their wills. As John wrote: “We were prepared to die. Some of us signed letters and wills. We didn’t know if we’d return.” In Rock Hill, South Carolina, they encountered their first violent resistance. As I wrote in To the Mountaintop , a book for younger readers whose parents weren’t even born then: A group of white toughs who frequented the bus station’s pinball machines were not waiting on the Freedom Riders, but when John Lewis stepped off the Greyhound bus and attempted to enter through the white entrance, one of the whites directed him to the colored entrance. Lewis responded: “I have a right to go in there on the grounds of the Supreme Court decision in the Boynton case.” One of the white youths spat out a profanity, and when Lewis ignored it and started in through the door a young white man punched him in the mouth, thus giving Lewis the dubious (but dare I say today, honorable) distinction of taking the first blow to a Freedom Rider. When other attackers proceeded to beat Lewis, Albert Bigelow, a white Freedom Rider, stepped in between them and was beaten to the ground. So was Genevieve Hughes, a female Freedom Rider. But beaten, bruised, and bleeding, they all got up and refused to press charges against their attackers. The next day, the group stopped only once, and briefly, in Athens, Georgia. What is most significant about that moment to me is that a few blocks from where they stopped, I sat alone in my dormitory, segregated on the first floor, away from all the other female students on the second floor—the University of Georgia’s (UGA) way of resisting the law they couldn’t legally resist to desegregate.

• From My People (2022)

  Bridges’ historic moment came when she became the first Black child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in New Orleans at six years old. She had to be escorted by federal marshals as she walked past loud and unruly protesters and into the William Frantz Elementary School. Now, sixty years later, Bridges has written to and for children the same age of her younger self. She describes it as a call to action and contains historical photos of her pioneering time. Pioneering history is still being made and remembered, including a photo illustration that went viral after the election of Vice President–elect Kamala Harris walking alongside the shadow of Ruby Bridges. Ruby Bridges, first, on behalf of my generation of civil rights pioneers, let me just say thank you for paving our way. Now, you have written other books, but this one is specifically aimed at readers who may be as young as you were when you first took those historic steps, when you were six years old, into the elementary school there. Why did you do this book? And do you see similarities between then and now in some ways? Ruby Bridges: Absolutely. You know, back in March [sic ], I was sitting in front of my television on lockdown because of the virus, like everybody else, and witnessed this young man’s brutal death, Mr. Floyd, right in front of my face, like so many people did. And I was so disturbed by it and didn’t know how to react or what to do. I felt like I’d been spending so many years talking to kids across the country. And I knew that they were watching this as well and probably wondering what was going on. The majority of my time, I talked to kids and explained to them that racism has no place in the minds and hearts of our kids across the country. And yet they were witnessing this. I was very moved by what I saw after his death. I saw young people take to the streets. And I felt like the torch had been passed and that now they had a cause to get behind. When Dr. King was assassinated, I felt like we should have picked that torch up and kept it moving. Even my own experience after going into the school, it was something that happened. No one talked about it in my community, in my neighborhood. It was swept under the rug, and life went on. I’m happy now to see that, all of a sudden, activism is cool again. And it should have been from 1960 until today. We didn’t do a very good job of passing those lessons on to that generation. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Let’s talk about teenagers and others in their twenties, the big demonstrations that are going on, multiracial, multigenerational, led by a lot of young people. But there are deep divisions. From politics, even to wearing masks, there are divisions. How do you explain that?

• From My People (2022)

  There’s far too many of you dying.” Hmm, I thought, as I swayed in my seat to the music. There was Dr. Robert Rusher, a Kaiser Permanente pulmonary physician and Boston University School of Medicine alum, who stood in the pulpit wearing his white doctor’s coat and a red tie because Dr. Ken Edelin had insisted that the interns always keep their red ties on. Dr. Edgar—aka Eddie—Mandeville, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Harlem Hospital, spoke of Edelin’s courage in the face of the illness that finally took his life. “We all saw it on display during the trial,” he said, referring to the abortion case of 1975. “Last year,” he went on, “Ken underwent a pelvic exenteration, which, without being specific, is one of the most devastating surgical procedures we offer. It robs one of great chunks not only of your anatomy but of your personhood. Most of our medical colleagues who I told of Ken’s decision stated that they would have thrown in the towel, but Ken never blinked or whined.” Deborah C. Jackson, president of Cambridge College and a longtime friend of the family, spoke also of how “Ken did not go gently into that good night.” Several of Edelin’s eight grandchildren stood in the pulpit as sixteen-year-old Kendall read a letter she wrote to God, asking why He took her grandfather, but ending with the uplifting “I’ll see you later.” It was Jeh Charles Johnson, the secretary of homeland security and Edelin’s nephew, who spoke of the impetus for Edelin’s decision to become a doctor when “he helplessly watched his mother die when he was twelve years old.” And these, Edelin’s own words in his powerful book, Broken Justice : She was only 46. Through the loneliness of being a motherless child, shuttled from relative to relative through the turmoil of adolescence and rebellion, I became all the more determined to be a doctor—a woman’s doctor—to save lives and perhaps spare some other woman’s son the anguish I had to go through. And finally, the Reverend Liz Walker delivered the eulogy. The former television anchor spoke movingly about the support she got from Edelin, her obstetrician, twenty-something years ago when she was being publicly vilified for being public, pregnant, and unwed. Dr. Edelin, she said, gave her the inspiration and support to face the criticism without shame.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The other women Lucy watches are Madame Beck and Mrs. Bretton. Both are older women, one a mother, one a businesswoman and head of a school. They are two of the most efficient women one can meet anywhere in fiction. Lucy, who, like Charlotte Brontë, lacked a mother, regards older women as the embodiment of competence, and what she loves in them is their brilliant ability to manage. While Victorian masculine fantasy saw only tender, quivering incapacity in such women, Lucy perceives them as big, capable ships and herself only a little boat. But the big ships are afloat because they knew how to compromise; Lucy does not plan to. The big ships are convention. For all the playful banter of her relationship with her son, Mrs. Bretton stands for a stale and selfless maternity, bent on living vicariously through her adored boy’s success. Pleasant matron that she is, she would sacrifice any daughter in the world for the comfort of his lordly breakfast, and Lucy knows it. Mrs. Bretton’s conventional motherhood is only the warm perfection of chauvinist sentiment. Then there is Madame Beck, a tower of convention, the tireless functionary of European sexual inhibition, watching every move of the young women under her Jehovahlike and unsleeping surveillance; getting up at night to examine Lucy’s underwear, reading her letters to sniff out traces of sex in them, watching for missives thrown from windows to her pupils. Both these women are still young and ripe for sexuality. Mrs. Bretton fulfills her own in flirtation with her son: “Mamma, I’m in a dangerous way.” “As if that interested me,” said Mrs. Bretton. “Alas! the cruelty of my lot!” responded her son. “Never man had a more unsentimental mother than mine; she never seems to think that such a calamity can befall her as a daughter-in-law.” “If I don’t, it is not for want of having that same calamity held over my head; you have threatened me with it for the last ten years. ‘Mamma, I am going to be married soon!’ was the cry before you were well out of jackets.” “But mother, one of these days it will be realized. All of a sudden, when you think you are most secure, I shall go forth like Jacob or Esau, or any other patriarch, and take me a wife, perhaps of these which are of the daughters of the land.” “At your peril, John Graham! that is all.”183

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Her arms, her breasts, her flanks were of a splendor... of a round fullness fit to serve as models to an artist; a black silken fleece covered her mons veneris, which was sustained by two superbly cast thighs; and what astonished me was that, despite the slenderness of the Countess' figure, despite her sufferings, nothing had impaired the firm quality of her flesh: her round, plump buttocks were as smooth, as ripe, as firm as if her figure were heavier and as if she had always dwelled in the depths of happiness. However, frightful traces of her husband's libertinage were scattered thickly about; but, I repeat, nothing spoiled, nothing damaged... the very image of a beautiful lily upon which the honeybee has inflicted some scratches. To so many gifts Madame de Gernande added a gentle nature, a romantic and tender mind, a heart of such sensibility!... welleducated, with talents... a native art for seduction which no one but her infamous husband could resist, a charming timbre in her voice and much piety: such was the unhappy wife of the Comte de Gernande, such was the heavenly creature against whom he had plotted; it seemed that the more she inspired ideas, the more she inflamed his ferocity, and that the abundant gifts she had received from Nature only became further motives for that villain's cruelties. "When were you last bled, Madame?" I asked in order to have her understand I was acquainted with everything. "Three days ago," she said, "and it is to be tomorrow...." Then, with a sigh: "... yes, tomorrow... Mademoiselle, tomorrow you will witness the pretty scene." "And Madame is not growing weak?" "Oh, Great Heaven! I am not twenty and am sure I shall be no weaker at seventy. But it will come to an end, I flatter myself in the belief, for it is perfectly impossible for me to live much longer this way: I will go to my Father, in the arms of the Supreme Being I will seek a place of rest men have so cruelly denied me on earth." These words clove my heart; wishing to maintain my role, I disguised my trouble, but upon the instant I made an inward promise to lay down my life a thousand times, if necessary, rather than leave this ill-starred victim in the clutches of this monstrous debauchee. The Countess was on the point of taking her dinner.

• From My People (2022)

  Norton, a Yale law graduate, and mother of a three-month-old child. “Black women had to work with or beside their men, because work was necessary to survival. As a result, that gave the black family very much a head start on egalitarian family life.” What about black women’s attitudes toward black men? According to Mrs. Norton: “Black men are the one group accustomed to women who are able and assertive, because their mothers and sisters were that way. And I don’t think they reject their mothers and sisters and wives. I don’t think they want wives to be like the white suburban chocolate eaters who live in Larchmont.” Mrs. Shirley Lacy, director of training for the Scholarship Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality—an integrated civil rights leadership training organization—has been called in by some black women’s groups to hold workshops that include discussions on the black woman’s role in the feminist movement. Mrs. Lacy said that it is terribly important for black women to look at where they are in this time and say: “‘Given what I’ve got, how can I best use that in the context of the black struggle?’ “And if it means that today I walk behind the black man,” she said, “that’s what I do today, but that may not be true tomorrow. It may be that tomorrow he’s going to fall, and I’m going to have to jump in there and be the leader. And the black man is going to have to understand that kind of juxtaposition, too.” New NAACP HeadMargaret Bush WilsonThe New York Times JANUARY 14, 1975 While Margaret Bush Wilson was working as acting director for Model Cities in St. Louis, she was puzzled when associates openly referred to her as Mary Poppins. “It was not until I left,” the diminutive Mrs. Wilson recalled yesterday, “that I learned that the rest of it was ‘. . . with a razor blade.’” The sixty-four-member board of directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which elected her as its new chairman yesterday, may or may not have heard that story. But that quality, according to many of them, was certainly among those taken into consideration when they chose her from among four contenders to succeed Bishop Stephen G. Spottswood, who died in December after serving as chairman since 1961. Board members say the natures of both racial discrimination, which comes in many forms, and the 400,000-member civil rights organization itself demand a leader at the top who knows how to combine the persistent optimism and charm of a Mary Poppins with a tough pragmatism. They said the board had felt comfortable in choosing the soft-spoken but firm lawyer to lead the organization and its employees because they had not only watched her grow up in the organization, but had tutored her as well. “She’s from one of the better-known middle-class black families in St.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In 2330 a new type of ruler emerged in Mesopotamia when Sargon, a common soldier of Semitic origins, staged a successful coup in the city of Kish, marched to Uruk, and deposed its king. He then repeated this process in one city after another until, for the very first time, Sumer was ruled by a single monarch. Sargon had created the world’s first agrarian empire.81 It was said that with his massive standing army of 5,400 men, he conquered territory in what is now Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. He built Akkad, an entirely new capital city, which may have stood near modern Baghdad. In his inscriptions, Sargon—his name meaning “True and Rightful King”—claimed to have ruled “the totality of lands under heaven,” and later generations would revere him as a model hero, not unlike Charlemagne or King Arthur. For millennia, in his memory, Mesopotamian rulers would style themselves “lord of Akkad.” Yet we know very little about either the man or his empire. Akkad was remembered as an exotic, cosmopolitan city and an important trade center, but its site has never been discovered. The empire has left little archaeological trace, and what we know of Sargon’s life is largely legendary. Yet his empire was a watershed. The world’s first supraregional polity, it became the model for all future agrarian imperialism, not simply because of Sargon’s prestige but because there seemed to be no viable alternative. Warfare and taxation would be essential to the economy of every future agrarian empire. The Akkadian Empire was achieved by the conquest of foreign territory: subject peoples were reduced to vassals, and kings and tribal chieftains became regional governors, their task to extort taxes in kind from their people—silver, grain, frankincense, metals, timber, and animals—and send them to Akkad. Sargon’s inscriptions claim that he fought thirty-four wars during his exceptionally long reign of fifty-six years. In all later agrarian empires, warfare was not an unusual crisis but became the norm; it was not simply the “sport of kings” but an economic and social necessity.82 Besides gaining plunder and loot, the chief goal of any imperial campaign was to conquer and tax more peasants. As the British historian Perry Anderson explains, “war was possibly the most rational and rapid single mode of economic expansion, of surplus extraction, available for any given ruling class.”83 Fighting and obtaining wealth were inseparable and interconnected: freed from the need to engage in productive work, the nobility had the leisure to cultivate their martial skills.84 They certainly fought for honor, glory, and the sheer pleasure of battle, but warfare was, “perhaps above all, a source of profit, the nobleman’s chief industry.”85 It needed no justification, because its necessity seemed self-evident.

• From My People (2022)

  “While Castro was cooking chickens ’cross the street, in the Theresa Hotel, Nasser was over here seeing me.” Journalists, foreign and domestic, often stop by at the bookstore—whose subtitle is the House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda—to ask Michaux questions about Harlem, and students, young and old, black and white, are always dropping in, to browse, to buy a book cheap, or just to see if Michaux is getting along all right. People in the community who have nowhere else to turn come to Michaux with their problems. In the course of a recent week, he counseled a young mother whose fourteen-year-old son was in jail on a narcotics charge, and listened sympathetically to the tale of an elderly woman from Brooklyn who was having trouble keeping her telephone. Some people come to the store only in order to say that they’ve been there, but they seldom go away empty-handed. (“This house is packed / With all the facts / About all the blacks / The world over,” one of a number of signs on the exterior of the store states.) A young Nigerian student arrived while we were there, looking for a book on Olódùmarè, the Yoruba god, and found Michaux holding forth in the store’s narrow doorway, which is identified by a sign as “Harlem Square.” Michaux, who was quoting one of his own compositions—a triplet, “The white man’s dream / Of being supreme / Has turned to sour cream”—heard the student say that the book was too expensive, and found out by questioning him that he was over here to get a master’s degree in engineering, that he planned to return to Nigeria to work, and that he would allow Michaux to come home to Africa with him. Michaux gave him the book and wished him well. The next morning, shortly after Michaux had opened the store, a group of three Negroes and twenty-one whites, who said they were a class of teachers enrolled in a three-week graduate workshop in human relations at City College, came by to have a session with the Professor, as Michaux is often called. We asked one young woman what happens during a three-week course in human relations, and she said, “We’ve been on a lot of field trips in the last few days. Last week, we saw The Pawnbroker .” Members of the class wandered around looking at the books, pamphlets, and magazines in the room: old books, like a fourth edition (1910) of the Etymological Dictionary of the English Language ; hardbound copies of W. E. B.