Anger

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.

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• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Where?” “I don’t think Mom and Dad would want me talking to you without them here,” I said. “Come back when they’re here. They’ll answer your questions.” “Good,” the man said. “I will come back. Tell them that.” He passed a business card through the crack in the doorway. I watched him make his way down to the ground. “Careful on those stairs now,” I called. “We’re in the process of building a new set.” • • • After the man left, I was so furious that I ran up the hillside and started hurling rocks—big rocks that it took two hands to lift—into the garbage pit. Except for Erma, I had never hated anyone more than I hated that child-welfare man. Not even Ernie Goad. At least when Ernie and his gang came around yelling that we were trash, we could fight them off with rocks. But if the child-welfare man got it into his head that we were an unfit family, we’d have no way to drive him off. He’d launch an investigation and end up sending me and Brian and Lori and Maureen off to live with different families, even though we all got good grades and knew Morse code. I couldn’t let that happen. No way was I going to lose Brian and Lori and Maureen. I wished we could do the skedaddle. For a long time Brian, Lori, and I had assumed we would leave Welch sooner or later. Every couple of months we’d ask Dad if we were going to move on. He’d sometimes talk about Australia or Alaska, but he never took any action, and when we asked Mom, she’d start singing some song about how her get up and go had got up and went. Maybe coming back to Welch had killed the idea Dad used to have of himself as a man going places. The truth was, we were stuck. When Mom got home, I gave her the man’s card and told her about his visit. I was still in a lather. I said that since neither she nor Dad could be bothered to work, and since she refused to leave Dad, the government was going to do the job of splitting up the family for her. I expected Mom to come back with one of her choice remarks, but she listened to my tirade in silence. Then she said she needed to consider her options. She sat down at her easel. She had run out of canvases and had begun painting on plywood, so she picked up a piece of wood, got out her palette, squeezed some paints onto it, and selected a brush. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’m thinking,” she said. Mom worked quickly, automatically, as if she knew exactly what it was she wanted to paint. A figure took shape in the middle of the board. It was a woman from the waist up, with her arms raised. Blue concentric circles appeared around the waist.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  A few years later, Terrell took up this local lost cause, with an interracial group of comrades who joined her in regular sit-ins at Thompson’s.87 When Terrell’s entourage was refused service, she and her party filed suit on behalf of the Coordinating Committee, with joint support from the City’s District Commissioners. In July of 1950, the D.C. Municipal Court held in favor of Thompson’s Restaurant, a decision that Terrell’s group immediately appealed. In June of 1951, the group scored its first legal victory when the Municipal Court of Appeals in D.C. declared that in fact the “Lost Law” of 1873 was valid and that restaurant owners in D.C. were subject to a fine and loss of license for racial discrimination. In complete defiance of the Municipal Court’s ruling, a local official pledged not to enforce the ruling. His defiance put a bit of a damper on the mass celebratory meeting that boycott organizers had pulled together for June 15. After nearly six decades of strategizing the most effective ways to “make democracy” for Black people in the U.S., Terrell sensed a deep urgency in her battle to desegregate the District. On discovering that local officials would not enforce the Appeals Court’s ruling to desegregate, she told her audience, “I am no longer ‘Sweet Sixteen,’ and I would like to live long enough to see this law enforced.”88 Moreover, she told them, “it pains me greatly to think that the Capital of my own country, the Capital of the United States of America—is the only Capital in the whole wide world in which restaurants refuse to serve colored people solely on account of their race.”89

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Her mother and brothers, seeing and hearing all this, turned upon her husband and said to him, 'What meanest thou, Arriguccio? This is not that so far which thou camest to tell us thou hadst done, and we know not how thou wilt make good the rest.' Arriguccio stood as one in a trance and would have spoken; but, seeing that it was not as he thought he could show, he dared say nothing; whereupon the lady, turning to her brothers, said to them, 'Brothers mine, I see he hath gone seeking to have me do what I have never yet chosen to do, to wit, that I should acquaint you with his lewdness and his vile fashions, and I will do it. I firmly believe that this he hath told you hath verily befallen him and that he hath done as he saith; and you shall hear how. This worthy man, to whom in an ill hour for me you gave me to wife, who calleth himself a merchant and would be thought a man of credit, this fellow, forsooth, who should be more temperate than a monk and chaster than a maid, there be few nights but he goeth fuddling himself about the taverns, foregathering now with this lewd woman and now with that and keeping me waiting for him, on such wise as you find me, half the night and whiles even till morning. I doubt not but that, having well drunken, he went to bed with some trull of his and waking, found the twine on her foot and after did all these his fine feats whereof he telleth, winding up by returning to her and beating her and cutting off her hair; and not being yet well come to himself, he fancied (and I doubt not yet fancieth) that he did all this to me; and if you look him well in the face, you will see he is yet half fuddled. Algates, whatsoever he may have said of me, I will not have you take it to yourselves except as a drunken man's talk, and since I forgive him, do you also pardon him.'

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  took shape among African American public intellectuals.” 49 By 1947, Murray, a graduate of Howard and newly named woman of the year by the National Council of Negro Women and Mademoiselle magazine, had indeed become a public figure. Murray took the opportunity in her article to further develop her conception of what Ayesha Hardison terms “Jane Crow discourse,” a way of speaking about “black female subjectivity under a specific set of social conditions: mass migration, changing gender relations, class anxiety and racial strife.” 50 Murray proclaimed that the Negro woman was in a “state of revolt” against a dual “framework of ‘male supremacy’ and ‘white supremacy’ [in which] the Negro woman finds herself at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.” 51 The revolt was being “felt most keenly among Negro college-trained and professional women.” Such a woman, who in many cases had outpaced her male counterpart in educational achievement, could not “find a mate with whom she can share all the richness of her life in addition to its functional aspects.” Murray averred that these women’s advanced educational skills and increased earning power “were a social handicap if [the woman] wanted marriage.” Men would shy away from such relationships, because “it is too great a threat to their security.” And since Black women could not look to these relationships for economic security, they might still find in them a modicum of emotional security. “But here again,” Murray declares, “she [the Negro woman] is defeated.” “The American Negro male is not prepared to offer emotional security because he has rarely, if ever, known it himself. ... His submerged status in American life places unnatural stresses and strains upon his already inadequate equipment inherited from our immature democracy.” 52 Notwithstanding the clear dig at Black men’s “inadequate equipment,” a dig that is shot through with Murray’s own anxieties regarding her “equipment,” she nailed the analysis of the ways that racism and the failures of liberal American democracy had stunted and entrapped Black men in retrograde ideas about Black masculinity. This frustrated masculine (and gender) development equated to a “general mis-education of the sexes,” which, when coupled with “outmoded social tabus [sic] ... have helped to form rigid moulds into which the sexes are poured and which determine in advance the role men and women are to play in community life.” The politics of racial manhood compelled Black men to “act as if they are the lords of creation, the breadwinners and warriors of our time and of all time.” But, Murray assessed, “they play the role with varying degrees of hamacting and success” and really “are as frightened and insecure as modern women are.” 53 In Murray’s estimation, Black men were frustrated patriarchs, not full-fledged patriarchal figures. In terms of Black feminist assessments of patriarchy, that intellectual distinction is important.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  remembered the prominent men: “Abram Harris, Charles H. Houston, Ralph Bunche, Marion Cuthbert [a woman], William Hastie, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W. E. B. Du Bois.” Those “last three,” she noted, “represented a link with the past.” But “we had ideas of our own, however, and insisted, as youth always does, that the progress of the Negro had been too slow.” 7 Hedgeman was especially enamored of the young economist Abram Harris and how his approach might help Black people struggling to recover from the Depression. She also recalled an excited “Charles Hamilton Houston, fresh from Amherst and Harvard, [filled] with plans for the development of the Howard University Law School [who] was discussing the role of the law in the struggle for Civil Rights.” What they came to agree on was that “increased training and specialization of the Negro would help him make new openings for other Negroes” ... in particular, “college graduates [with] specialized training in the liberal arts could bring new strength.” 8 Despite her reservations about the inherent elitism of being classed among the “intellectuals,” Hedgeman supported the broad liberal vision put forth by the “Young Turks” at Amenia II. This liberal vision informed her work as the first Black woman to serve on a New York mayoral cabinet under the Wagner administration in the 1950s. 9 And in the 1960s, she was invited by A. Philip Randolph to complete the work she had begun with him in the 1940s in New York during the first March on Washington Movement, where she also worked with a young Pauli Murray. For the 1963 March, she teamed up with the “Big Six”: A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, James Farmer, Whitney Young, and John Lewis. FIGURE 6. Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Courtesy of Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Manuscripts Division, Howard University, Washington D.C. However, one week before the March she realized that “no woman [was] listed as a speaker” on the program. So “it was proposed that Mr. Randolph, as chairman, would ask several Negro women to stand while he reviewed the historic role of Negro women, and that the women would merely take a bow at the end of his presentation.” Internally, she balked at this dismissive attempt to silence Black women by not even allowing them to speak, while claiming to celebrate them. She found it “significant that not even the rebellious youth leader [presumably John Lewis] thought of the role which woman had played in the present phase of the continuing Negro revolution.” 10 She thus marshaled her forces and sent a memo to Randolph: “In light of the role of Negro women in the struggle for freedom and especially in light of the extra burden they have carried because of the castration of our Negro man in this culture, it is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker at the historic March on Washington Meeting at the Lincoln Memorial.” She went on to request “that a Negro woman make a brief statement and present the other Heroines just as you have suggested that the Chairman might do.” 11 She suggested two potential women: Myrlie Evers, widow of Medgar Evers, and Diane Nash Bevel. But the male organizers remained resistant about female participation. Because of consistent advocacy and agitation on the part of Hedgeman, Pauli Murray, and Dorothy Height, on the day of the March “Daisy Bates was asked to say a few words,” but even then A. Philip Randolph limited her time at the microphone. Hedgeman noted that “Mrs. Rosa Parks, the courageous woman who had refused to ‘move to the back of the bus,’ in Montgomery was presented, but almost casually.” 12 That elicited a shared knowing among many of the women there: “[W]e grinned; some of us, as we recognized anew that Negro women are second-class citizens in the same way that white women are in our culture.” 13 Published in 1964 just one year after the March, Hedgeman’s “memoir of Negro leadership,” Trumpet Sounds, acts as an intervention in a recalcitrant masculinist narrative of racial leadership. The gender politics of the March on Washington demonstrate firsthand the ways in which this symbolic show of the Black freedom struggle was inherently gendered and fraught with Black men’s own investments in dominating the direction of racial leadership. Not only did Hedgeman call the Civil Rights establishment publicly to task, but she also took specific aim at King. She acknowledged that King’s “speech on

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Chapter four returns to the question of what it means to be a Black woman intellectual by interrogating the claims in an article in Ebony Magazine in 1966 called “Problems of the Negro Woman Intellectual.” Given the ferment of racial crises in the 1960s, this chapter argues that much like the transitional period of the 1890s, the transition from Civil Rights to Black Power was marked by a tension over the roles that Black women would play, not only as political activists, but as intellectual leaders. Thus Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual erased a long and significant history of Black women’s intellectual labor in order to sustain his narrative of racial crisis. What really seems to be in crisis are the terms of Black masculinity. I read Toni Cade Bambara’s book of essays Black Woman as a critical corrective to Cruse’s assertions because Black Woman presses the case for Black women’s centrality as thought leaders and public intellectuals in racial justice struggles, and Bambara and her comrades approach the same political moment as an opportunity for creativity around the articulation of new modes of what she terms Blackhood rather than embracing the narrative of crisis. In many ways, her anthology and the feminist anthologies that come after it expand on Black women’s intellectual practice of listing from the nineteenth century. In every period where Black communities struggled to find their thought leaders, Black women always named the women doing the work, but usually receive little credit for it. By the late twentieth century, these lists became full anthologies of Black women’s thinking about race, gender, and politics. This chapter makes clear that the struggle to be known and to have the range of Black women’s experiences properly articulated in the public sphere is a recurring struggle for Black women thinkers. At the same time, these women engage in a range of creative practices to make Black women’s lives legible in public discourse.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  3 “Speak a parable against the rebellious house [of Judah] and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD , “Put on a pot; put it on and also pour water into it; 4 “Put in it the pieces [of meat], Every good piece (the people of Jerusalem), the thigh and the shoulder; Fill it with choice bones. 5 “Take the choicest of the flock, And also pile wood under the pot. Make it boil vigorously And boil its bones in the pot.” 6 ‘Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD , “Woe (judgment is coming) to the bloody city, To the pot in which there is rust And whose rust has not gone out of it! Take out of it piece by piece, Without making any choice. 7 “For her blood [that she has shed] remains in her midst; She put it on the bare rock; She did not pour it on the ground To cover it with dust. 8 “That it may cause wrath to come up to take vengeance, I have put her blood [guilt for her children sacrificed to Molech] on the bare rock, That it may not be covered.” 9 ‘Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD , “Woe to the bloody city! I will also make the pile [of wood] high. 10 “Heap on wood, kindle the fire, Boil the meat well [done] And mix in the spices, And let the bones be burned. 11 “Then set the empty pot (Jerusalem) back on the coals So that it may be hot And its bronze may glow And its filthiness may be melted And its rust (scum) may be consumed. 12 “She has wearied Me with toil, Yet her great rust has not left her; Her thick rust and filth will not be burned away by fire [no matter how hot the flame]. 13 “In your filthiness are lewdness and outrage. Therefore I would have cleansed you, Yet you were not [willing to be] cleansed, You will not be cleansed from your filthiness again Until I have satisfied My wrath against you. 14 “I the LORD have spoken; it is coming and I will act. I will not relent, and I will not have compassion and I will not be sorry; in accordance with your ways and in accordance with your deeds I will judge and punish you,” says the Lord GOD .’ ” Death of Ezekiel’s Wife Is a Sign 15 Also the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 16 “Son of man, listen carefully, I am about to take away from you the desire of your eyes [your wife] with a single stroke. Yet you shall not mourn and you shall not weep, and your tears shall not flow. 17 “Sigh and groan in silence; do not mourn for the dead.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  9 Then Jesus said to them, “I ask you directly: Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil, to save a life or to destroy it?” 10 After looking around at them all, He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand!” And he did, and his hand was [fully] restored. 11 But the scribes and Pharisees were filled with senseless rage [and lacked spiritual insight], and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus. Choosing the Twelve 12 Now at this time Jesus went off to the mountain to pray, and He spent the whole night in prayer to God. 13 When day came, He called His disciples and selected twelve of them, whom He also named c apostles (special messengers, personally chosen representatives): [Matt 10:2–4 ; Mark 3:16–19 ] 14 Simon, whom He also named Peter, and his brother Andrew; and [the brothers] d James and John; and Philip, and Bartholomew [also called Nathanael]; 15 and Matthew (Levi, the tax collector) and Thomas; and e James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon who was called the Zealot; 16 Judas [also called Thaddaeus] the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor [to the Lord]. 17 Then Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place; and there was a large crowd of His disciples, and a vast multitude of people from all over Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon, 18 who had come to listen to Him and to be healed of their diseases. Even those who were troubled by unclean spirits (demons) were being healed. 19 All the people were trying to touch Him, because [healing] power was coming from Him and healing them all. The Beatitudes 20 And looking toward His disciples, He began f speaking: “Blessed [spiritually prosperous, happy, to be admired] are you who are poor [in spirit, those devoid of spiritual arrogance, those who regard themselves as insignificant], for the kingdom of God is yours [both now and forever]. [Matt 5:3–12 ] 21 “Blessed [joyful, nourished by God’s goodness] are you who hunger now [for righteousness, actively seeking right standing with God], for you will be [completely] satisfied. Blessed [forgiven, refreshed by God’s grace] are you who weep now [over your sins and repent], for you will laugh [when the burden of sin is lifted]. 22 “Blessed [morally courageous and spiritually alive with life-joy in God’s goodness] are you when people hate you, and exclude you [from their fellowship], and insult you, and scorn your name as evil because of [your association with] the Son of Man. 23 “Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for your reward in heaven is great [absolutely inexhaustible]; for their fathers used to treat the prophets in the same way.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  10 So the Jews kept saying to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and you are not d permitted to pick up your pallet [because it is unlawful].” 11 He answered them, “The Man who healed me and gave me back my strength was the One who said to me, ‘Pick up your pallet and walk.’ ” 12 They asked him, “Who is the Man who told you, ‘Pick up your pallet and walk’?” 13 Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had slipped away [unnoticed] since there was a crowd in that place. 14 Afterward, Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” 15 The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. 16 For this reason the Jews began to persecute Jesus continually because He was doing these things on the Sabbath. 17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father has been working until now [He has never ceased working], and I too am working.” Jesus’ Equality with God 18 This made the Jews more determined than ever to kill Him, for not only was He breaking the Sabbath [from their viewpoint], but He was also calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. 19 So Jesus answered them by saying, “I assure you and most solemnly say to you, the Son e can do nothing of Himself [of His own accord], unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever things the Father does, the Son [in His turn] also does in the same way. 20 “For the Father dearly loves the Son and shows Him everything that He Himself is doing; and the Father will show Him greater works than these, so that you will be filled with wonder. 21 “Just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life [and allows them to live on], even so the Son also gives life to whom He wishes. 22 “For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment [that is, the prerogative of judging] to the Son [placing it entirely into His hands], 23 so that all will give honor (reverence, homage) to the Son just as they give honor to the Father. [In fact] the one who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who has sent Him. 24 “I assure you and most solemnly say to you, the person who hears My word [the one who heeds My message], and believes and trusts in Him who sent Me, has (possesses now) eternal life [that is, eternal life actually begins—the believer is transformed], and does not come into judgment and condemnation, but has passed [over] from death into life.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [Acts 2:17–21 ; Rom 10:13 ] Joel 3 The Nations Will Be Judged 1 “F OR BEHOLD, in those [climactic] days and at that time, When I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, 2 I will gather together all the [Gentile] nations [that were hostile to My people] And bring them down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat (the LORD has judged). And there I will deal with them and enter into judgment with them there For [their treatment of] My people, My inheritance, Israel, Whom they have scattered among the nations, And [because] they have encroached on My land and divided it up. 3 “They have also cast lots for My people, And have traded a boy for a prostitute And have sold a girl for wine that they may drink. 4 “Moreover, what are you to Me, O Tyre and Sidon and all the [five small] regions of Philistia? Will you pay Me back for something [I have supposedly done to you]? Even if you do pay Me back, I will swiftly and speedily return your deed [of retaliation] on your own head. [Is 23 ; Ezek 26:1–18 ; Amos 1:6–10 ; Zeph 2:4–7 ; Zech 9:2–7 ] 5 “Because you have taken My silver and My gold and have carried My precious treasures to your temples and palaces, 6 and have sold the children of Judah and the children of Jerusalem to the Greeks, so that you may send them far away from their territory, 7 behold, I am going to stir them up from the place where you have sold them [and return them to their land], and I shall return your action [of retaliation] on your own head. 8 “Also I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hand of the children of Judah, and they will sell them to the a Sabeans, to a distant nation,” for the LORD has spoken. [Is 14:2 ; 60:14 ] 9 Proclaim this among the [pagan] nations: Prepare a war! Stir up the mighty men! Let all the men of war come near, let them come up! 10 Beat your plowshares into swords And your pruning hooks into spears; Let the weak say, “I am strong!” [Is 2:4 ; Mic 4:3 ] 11 Hurry and come, all you surrounding nations, And gather yourselves there; Bring down, O LORD , Your mighty ones (Your warriors). 12 Let the nations be stirred [to action] And come up to the Valley of Jehoshaphat, For there I will sit to judge and punish All the surrounding nations. 13 Put in the sickle [of judgment], for the harvest is ripe; Come, tread [the grapes], for the wine press is full; The vats overflow, for the wickedness [of the people] is great. [Mark 4:29 ; Rev 14:15 , 18–20 ] 14 Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision (judgment)! For the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision [when judgment is executed].

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  23 “Moreover, I swore to them in the wilderness that I would scatter them among the [Gentile] nations and disperse them among the countries, 24 because they had not observed My ordinances, but had [dishonored and] rejected My statutes and had profaned My Sabbaths, and set their eyes on the [man-made] idols of their fathers. 25 “[Therefore] I also gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live; [Ps 81:12 ; Is 66:4 ; Rom 1:21–25 , 28 ] 26 and I pronounced them unclean because of their offerings [to their idols], in that they made all their firstborn pass through the fire [as pagan sacrifices], so that I might make them desolate, in order that they might know [without any doubt] that I am the LORD .” ’ [Lev 20:2–5 ] 27 “Therefore, son of man, speak to the house of Israel and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD , “Again in this your fathers have blasphemed Me, in that they acted faithlessly and treacherously against Me. 28 “For when I had brought them into the land which I swore to give to them, they saw every high hill and every dark and leafy tree [as a place for idol worship], and there they offered their sacrifices and there they presented their offering that provoked My anger; there also they made their sweet-smelling aroma and there poured out their drink offerings. 29 “Then I said to them, ‘What is the high place to which you go?’ So the name of it is called Bamah (High Place) to this day.” ’ 30 “Therefore, say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD , “Will you [exiles] defile yourselves in the same manner as your fathers? And will you prostitute yourselves before their loathsome and heinous things? 31 “When you offer your gifts, when you make your sons pass through the fire, you are defiling yourselves with all your idols to this day. And shall I be asked by you [for an oracle], O house of Israel? As I live,” says the Lord GOD , “I will not be inquired of by you. 32 “What comes into your mind will never happen, when you say, ‘We will be like the [pagan] nations, like the tribes of the [Gentile] countries, serving [idols made of] wood and stone.’ God Will Restore Israel to Her Land 33 “As I live,” says the Lord GOD , “most certainly with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with wrath poured out, I shall be King over you. 34 “I will bring you out from the peoples and will gather you from the countries in which you are scattered, with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm, and with wrath poured out; 35 and I will bring you into the wilderness of the peoples, and there I will enter into judgment with you and contend with you face to face.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Murray’s masculine gender performance caused problems for her in both her activism and in her education. In 1938, she attempted to desegregate a University of North Carolina graduate program, ironically the same program in which Garfinkel would become a student. Denied admission because of her race, Murray sought to become one of the NAACP’s test cases under the Plessy segregation statute. Murray pursued admittance to UNC with her characteristic fervor. She wrote letters to the UNC president, the campus newspaper, and other local opponents like James Shepard, president of North Carolina College for Negroes.28 But her unapologetic boldness was perceived as a dangerous, if naive, brashness by the NAACP’s leadership, especially Roy Wilkins. Glenda Gilmore notes that Roy Wilkins actively lobbied against the NAACP taking Murray’s case because “since she has gone this far [in writing letters], she should be allowed to proceed by herself.”29 Officially, the NAACP declined Murray’s case on the grounds that her college attendance and subsequent employment in New York made her state residency claim shaky. However, I concur with Gilmore’s assessment that Wilkins’s decision was motivated by more personal matters, including Murray’s less-than-secret lesbian associations, and even perhaps her bouts with mental illness. Murray’s refusal to comply, at least during her college and young adult years, with the compulsory heterosexuality demanded of all respectable race figures, especially its women, became costly as she sought to champion racial causes. Her leadership style was precocious, aggressive, combative, unrelenting, and intellectual. With regard to her intellectual and rhetorical ability, Murray never suffered from a lack of confidence. She often registered her protest at various and sundry injustices through lengthy letters that she referred to as “confrontation by typewriter.”30 During her work with A. Philip Randolph on the first March on Washington Movement in the early 1940s, Murray told him that she considered herself one of his “lieutenants” in the struggle against racial repression.31 Wilkins himself was undoubtedly exasperated by what he and Marshall referred to as Murray’s “maverick spirit.”32 This sense of self-possession and her sense of wanting to be classed as a man among men caused Murray to be off-putting to figures like Wilkins and Marshall, who were not known for their progressive attitudes on gender.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Most of the people named would be men like Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Michael Eric Dyson, Marc Lamont Hill, and Robin D. G. Kelley. However, the list of women would still primarily include Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Patricia Williams. The one remarkable addition would be Melissa Harris-Perry. Harris-Perry, a full professor of political science at Wake Forest University, hosted a popular weekend cable news show offering overtly Black feminist cultural and political commentary on everything from politics to popular culture from 2012 to 2016. Her show absolutely transformed the landscape of possibility for Black women intellectuals by routinely highlighting the important intellectual contributions of a range of other Black women thinkers inside and outside the academy. In November 2015, Melissa Harris-Perry and Valerie Jarrett, the director of the White House Council on Women and Girls convened a historic summit at the White House called “Advancing Equity for Women and Girls of Color.” 5 This work is directly attributable to the organizing undertaken by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and a group of academics, activists, and philanthropists, after President Obama pledged in 2014 to address the social injustices facing only men and boys of color through an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Black women were outraged at the President’s attempt to exclude Black women and girls, who experience racial injustice right alongside Black men and boys. In addition to an open letter organized by Crenshaw’s African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and a national traveling series of town halls featuring testimonies of women and girls of color organized by Crenshaw and Joanne Smith of Girls for Gender Equity, the AAPF issued a series of reports documenting the unique intersectional jeopardies faced by Black girls. 6 Harris-Perry took up this cause by featuring stories about this counter-organizing against My Brother’s Keeper on her show and then using the Anna Julia Cooper Research Center, which she founded at Wake Forest University, to partner with the White House in a ten-year research project about Black women and girls. These efforts to make visible and legible the plight of Black women and girls, this campaign to rescue them from political and social obscurity, fits within the long history, documented in this book, of Black women making the case that Black women’s lives are worthy of study and that their struggles are worthy of social remedy. The organizing of Crenshaw, Harris-Perry, Smith, and others also places these race women within a history of Black women using institutional access and resources to make the plight of Black women and girls visible. It is frustrating that Black women have to keep fighting such battles in every generation. But this book demonstrates that they have a very robust and multigenerational playbook to aid their efforts. Harris-Perry’s time as a host at MSNBC was nothing if not embattled.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Despite the auspiciousness of Howard’s intellectual and political culture, Murray also bore the brunt of deeply ingrained sexist practices. The only female student in her class, she was excluded from joining the campus legal fraternity. When she confronted Ransom about this obviously exclusive process, he told her to start her own legal sorority. Murray perceived her exclusion from the “fraternity of lawyers who would make civil rights history” not as an isolated case of sexism, but rather a representative case of a larger practice of sexist exclusion among many of the most notable civil rights pioneers. “The discovery,” wrote Murray, “that Ransom and other men I deeply admired because of their dedication to civil rights, men who themselves suffered racial indignities, could countenance the exclusion of women from their professional association aroused an incipient feminism in me long before I knew the meaning of the term ‘feminism.’”39 Her experience within the intellectual and political culture at Howard involved a kind of cultural disciplining and gender policing designed to force Murray into her “place.” Still beset with conflicts over her gender identity, Murray herself struggled to know what her place was. In May of 1943, the summer before her final year at Howard Law, she found herself again hospitalized with depression, this time in Freedman’s Hospital on Howard’s campus. Dealing with the kinds of racial masculinity propagated at Howard, and the deliberate exclusion from certain privileges on account of her femaleness, certainly did not help matters. When Murray confronted the politics of racial manhood in operation at Howard, she also confronted a kind of racial disciplining that encoded a demand for strict gender conformity. Racial respectability demanded not only heteronormative gender role performances and sexual relations, but also cisgender identity performances as well. Though she was clearly committed to the uplift of her race, Murray struggled to “become a woman.”

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  22 “The LORD could no longer endure it, because of the evil of your acts and the repulsive acts which you have committed; because of them your land has become a ruin, an object of horror and a curse, without inhabitant, as it is this day. 23 “Because you have burned sacrifices [to idols] and because you have sinned against the LORD and have not obeyed the voice of the LORD or walked in His law and in His statutes and in His testimonies, therefore this tragedy has fallen on you, as it has this day.” 24 Then Jeremiah said to all the people, including all the women, “Hear the word of the LORD , all [you of] Judah who are in the land of Egypt, 25 thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, as follows: ‘You and your wives have both declared with your mouth and fulfilled it with your hand, saying, “We will certainly perform our vows that we have vowed, to burn sacrifices to the queen of heaven (Ishtar) and to pour out drink offerings to her.” Surely then confirm your vows and go ahead and perform your vows! [If you intend to defy all My warnings, proceed!]’ 26 “Therefore hear the word of the LORD , all [you people of] Judah who are living in the land of Egypt, ‘Behold, I have sworn [an oath] by My great Name,’ says the LORD , ‘that My Name shall never again be invoked by the mouth of any man of Judah in all the land of Egypt, saying, “As the Lord GOD lives.” 27 ‘Behold, I am watching over them for harm and not for good; and all the men of Judah who are in the land of Egypt shall be consumed by the sword and by famine until they are all destroyed. 28 ‘Yet a small number [of My choosing] who escape the sword will return from the land of Egypt to the land of Judah; and all the remnant of Judah who have gone to the land of Egypt to reside there will know whose words will stand, Mine or theirs.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  All together, the federal government has spent $1.7 billion plus on abstinence-only programs since 1982; that money might just as well have been set on fire. As I mentioned earlier, while virginity pledgers delayed intercourse for a few months longer than their nonpledging peers, when they did become sexually active, they were less likely to protect themselves or their partners against pregnancy or disease. The same holds true for participants in abstinence-only classes. Studies stretching back over a decade have found that, at best, when compared to a control group, participants neither abstain entirely from sex nor delay intercourse; they also do not have fewer sexual partners. They are, however, a lot more likely to become unintentionally pregnant: as much as 60 percent more likely. That could lead one to suspect that abstinence-only advocates are more concerned with ideology than with public health or even sexual restraint—otherwise they would have given it up long ago for something that has been repeatedly proven to reduce teens’ sexual activity, increase their use of contraception and disease protection, and improve their relationships: comprehensive sex education. Under President Barack Obama, comprehensive sex ed finally got its first federal love, although the focus remained squarely on reducing negative consequences: $185 million earmarked for research and programs that have been shown, through rigorous evaluation, to reduce teen pregnancy. That money, of course, could easily disappear under another, less progressive commander in chief, and probably will: for instance, a clause buried in the Student Success Act, a Republican rewrite of No Child Left Behind that passed the House in the summer of 2015, zeros out any funding for programs that “normalize teen sexual activity as an expected behavior, implicitly or explicitly, whether homosexual or heterosexual.” Meanwhile, $75 million in abstinence-only funds continued to be doled out each year through the Affordable Care Act. While substantially less than under President Bush, that’s still an awful lot to blow on the sex ed equivalent of a tinfoil hat.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  23 Yet You, O LORD , know All their deadly plotting against me; Do not forgive their wickedness Or blot out their sin from Your sight. But let them be overthrown before You; Deal with them in the time of Your anger. Jeremiah 19 The Broken Jar 1 T HUS SAYS the LORD , “Go and buy a potter’s earthenware jar, and take some of the elders of the people and some of the senior priests 2 and go out to the Valley of Ben-hinnom (son of Hinnom), which is near the entrance of the Potsherd Gate; and proclaim there the words that I tell you, 3 and say, ‘Hear the word of the LORD , O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, “Behold (listen carefully), I am going to bring such disaster on this place that the ears of everyone who hears about it will tingle [in shock]. 4 “Because the people [of Jerusalem] have abandoned (rejected) Me and have made this an alien and profaned place by burning sacrifices and incense in it to other gods, that neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent 5 and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever enter My mind (heart); 6 therefore, listen very closely, the days are coming,” says the LORD , “when this place shall no longer be called Topheth or the Valley of Ben-hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter. [Jer 7:31–32 ] 7 “I will pour out and nullify the counsel (plans) of [the men of] Judah and Jerusalem in this place, and I will make their people fall by the sword before their enemies and by the hand of those who seek their lives; and I will give their dead bodies as food for the birds of the air and for the beasts of the earth. 8 “I will make this city a desolation and an object of hissing; everyone who passes by it will be amazed and will hiss [in scorn] because of all its plagues and disasters. 9 “And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and their daughters, and each one will eat one another’s flesh during the siege and distress brought by their enemies and those who seek their lives.” ’ 10 “Then you are to break the jar in the sight of the men who accompany you, 11 and say to them, ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts, “This is the way I will break this people and this city as one breaks a potter’s vessel, so that it cannot be mended. They will bury [corpses] in Topheth until there is no more room left [in that place] to bury [the dead].

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  16 “Yet you backed out [of the covenant] and profaned My Name, and each man took back his servants, male and female, whom had been set free in accordance with their desire, and you brought them into servitude [again] to be your male servants and your female servants.” ’ 17 “Therefore says the LORD , ‘You have not obeyed Me; you have not proclaimed liberty to your brother and your countryman. Behold (listen very carefully), I am proclaiming liberty to you—[liberty to be put] to the sword, [liberty] to [be ravaged by] the virulent disease, and [liberty] to [be decimated by] famine,’ says the LORD ; ‘and I will make you a horror and a warning to all the kingdoms of the earth. 18 ‘The men who have violated My covenant, who have not kept the terms of the solemn pledge which they made before Me when they split the [sacrificial] calf in half, and then afterwards walked between its separated pieces [sealing their pledge to Me by placing a curse on themselves should they violate the covenant—those men I will make like the calf]! [Gen 15:9 , 10 , 17 ] 19 ‘The princes of Judah, the princes of Jerusalem, the high officials, the priests, and all the people of the land who passed between the parts of the calf, 20 I will give into the hand of their enemies and into the hand of those who seek their lives. And [like the body of the calf] their dead bodies will be food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth. 21 ‘Zedekiah king of Judah and his princes I will place into the hand of their enemies and into the hand of those who seek their life, and into the hand of the army of the king of Babylon which has withdrawn from you. 22 ‘Behold, I am going to command [the Chaldeans who rule Babylon],’ says the LORD , ‘and I will bring them back to this city; and they will fight against it and take it and set it on fire.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  In July 2013, organizers Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi used social media to proclaim that #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of seventeen-year-old unarmed Florida teen Trayvon Martin. By the next summer, August 2014, these young Black women found themselves at the helm of a new national civil rights movement as Black people in Ferguson, Missouri, and around the country took to the streets to protest the slaughter of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Wilson claimed that the unarmed youth attacked him in his police car after Brown and his friend allegedly refused the officer’s command to “get the fuck up on the sidewalk” instead of walking in the middle of a residential street in his neighborhood. By October 2014, Alicia Garza wrote a herstory of the burgeoning BLM Movement, after early attempts at co-optation threatened to erase the intellectual and political labor undertaken by these three Black women. Much like Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Pauli Murray, and other race women who had come before her, she called out and stridently critiqued the continued celebration of heterosexual, charismatic Black male leadership.1 Moreover, her comments appeared at Feminist Wire, an online site founded by two Black feminist academics, Tamura Lomax and Hortense Spillers, in order to highlight conversations of relevance to women of color about social justice. In the streets, in the academy, and online, Black women thinkers continue to reimagine and reshape the terms upon which Black women’s knowledge production takes place. It is, therefore, befitting that the intellectual geography and genealogy that I have been building in this book end at the beginning of this new, dynamic, and powerful women-led Movement for Black Lives. The largely Black female leadership of the Movement for Black Lives has the potential to usher in a new era in our thinking about the most effective models of racial leadership. Both Garza and Khan-Cullors are queer Black women, and they have insisted that the Black Lives Matter leadership and organizing model move, as Garza mentioned in her herstory, beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.2

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Most of our choice writers, from Plato to Havelock Ellis, from Aristophanes to Shaw, from Catullus and Ovid to Shakespeare, Shelley and Swinburne, together with the Bible, to be sure, have been the target of those who are forever in search of what is impure, indecent and immoral. In an article called “Freedom of Expression in Literature,”2 Huntington Cairns, one of the most broad-minded and clear-sighted of all the censors, stresses the need for the re-education of officials charged with law enforcement. “In general,” he states, “such men have had little or no contact with science or art, have had no knowledge of the liberty of expression tacitly granted to men of letters since the beginnings of English literature, and have been, from the point of view of expert opinion, altogether incompetent to handle the subject. Administrative officials, not the populace who in the main have only a negligible contact with art, stand first in need of re-education.” Perhaps it should be noted here, in passing, that though our Federal government exercises no censorship over works of art originating in the country, it does permit the Treasury Department to pass judgments upon importations from abroad. In 1930, the Tariff Act was revised to permit the Secretary of the Treasury, in his discretion, to admit the classics or books of recognized and established literary or scientific merit, even if obscene. What is meant by “books of recognized and established literary merit?” Mr. Cairns gives us the following interpretation: “books which have behind them a substantial and reputable body of American critical opinion indicating that the works are of meritorious quality.” This would seem to represent a fairly liberal attitude, but when it comes to a test, when a book or other work of art is capable of creating a furore, this seeming liberality collapses. It has been said with regard to the sonnets of Aretino that they were condemned for four hundred years. How long we shall have to wait for the ban to be lifted on certain famous contemporary works no one can predict. In the article alluded to above, Mr. Cairns admits that “there is no likelihood whatever that the present obscenity statutes will be repealed.” “None of the statutes,” he goes on to say, “defines the word ‘obscenity’ and there is thus a wide latitude of discretion in the meaning to be attributed to the term.” Those who imagine that the Ulysses decision established a precedent should realize by now that they were overoptimistic. Nothing has been established where books of a disturbing nature are concerned. After years of wrestling with prudes, bigots and other psychopaths who determine what we may or may not read, Theodore Schroeder is of the opinion that “it is not the inherent quality of the book which counts, but its hypothetical influence upon some hypothetical person, who at some problematical time in the future may hypothetically read the book.” In his book called A Challenge to Sex Censors , Mr.