Hope

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 Collected Essays (1998)

  We do not, in this country now, have much taste for, or any real sense of, the extremes human beings can reach; time will impr ove us in this regard; but in the meantime the general fear of experience is one of the reasons that the American writer has so peculi arly difficult and dangerous a time. One can never really see into the heart, the mind, the soul of another. Norman is my very good friend, but perhaps I do not really under stand him at all, and perhaps everyt hing I have tried to sug gest in the foregoing is false. I do not think so, but it may be. One thing, however, I am certain is not false, and that is simply the fact of his being a writer, and the in calculable potential he as a writer contains. His work, after all, THE BL ACK BOY LOOK S AT THE WHITE BOY 285 is all that will be left when the newspapers are yellowed, all the gossip columni sts silenced, and all the cocktail parties m·er, and when Norman and you and I are dead. I know that this point of view is not terribly fashionable these days, but I think we do have a responsibility, not only to ourselves and to our own time, but to those who are coming after us. (I refuse to belie,·e that no one is coming after us .) And I suppose that this responsibilit y can only be discharged by dealing as truth fully as we know how with our present fortunes, these present days. So that my concern with �orman, finally, has to do with how deeply he has understood these last sad and stormy e\·ents. If he has understood them, then he is richer and we are richer, too; if he has not understood them, we are all much poorer. For, though it clearly needs to be brought into focus, he has a real \"ision of ourseh·es as we are, and it cannot be too often repeated in this count ry now, that, where there is no ,·ision, the people perish. THE FIR E NEXT TI ME aGod gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!" for James James Luc James Contents MY DUNGEON SHOOK: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundr edth Ann iversary of the Emancipat ion DoWN AT THE CRoss: Letter from a Region in My Mind . .

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Someone said, and said it very accurately, that what is honored in a country is cultivated there. If we apply this touchstone to American life we can scarcely fail to arrive at a very grim view of it. But I think we have to look grim facts in the face because if we don't, we can never hope to change them. These vanished aristocracies, these vanished standard bear ers, had several limitations, and not the least of these limi tations was the fact that their standards were essentially IN SEARCH OF A MAJORITY 21 7 nostalgic. They referred to a past condition; they referred to the achievements, the laborious achievements, of a stratified society; and what was evolving in America had nothing to do with the past. So inevitably what happened, putting it far too simply, was that the old forms gave way before the European tidal wave, gave way before the rush ofltalians, Greeks, Span iards, Irishmen, Poles, Persians, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, wandering Jews from every nation under heaven, Turks, Ar menians, Lithuanians, Japanese, Chinese, and Indians. Every body was here suddenly in the melting pot, as we like to say, but without any intention of being melted. They were here because they had wanted to leave wherever they had been and they were here to make their lives, and achieve their futures, and to establish a new identity. I doubt if history has ever seen such a spectacle, such a conglomeration of hopes, fears, and desires. I suggest, also, that they presented a problem for the Puritan God, who had never heard ofthem and of whom they had never heard. Almost always as they arrived, they took their places as a minority, a minority because their influence was so slight and because it was their necessity to make themselves over in the image of their new and unformed country. There were no longer any universally accepted forms or standards, and since all the roads to the achievement of an identity had vanished, the problem of status in American life became and it remains today acute. In a way, status became a kind of sub stitute for identity, and because money and the things money can buy is the universally accepted symbol here of status, we are often condemned as materialists. In fact, we arc much closer to being metaphysical because nobody has ever ex pected fr om things the miracles that we expect. Now I think it will be taken for granted that the Irish, the Swedes, the Danes, etc., who came here can no longer be considered in any serious way as minorities; and the question of anti-Semitism presents too many special features to be prof itably discussed here tonight. The American minorities can be placed on a kind of color wheel.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Again, the most trenchant observers of the scene in the South, those who arc embattled there, feel that the Southern mobs arc not an ex pression of the Southern majority will. Their impression is that these mobs fill, so to speak, a moral vacuum and that the people who form these mobs would be very happy to be re leased from their pain, and their ignorance, if someone arrived to show them the way. I would be inclined to agree with this, simply from what we know of human nature. It is not my impression that people wish to become worse; they really wish to become better but very often do not know how. Most people assume the position, in a way, of the Jews in Egypt, who really wished to get to the Promised Land but were afraid of the rigors of the journey; and, of course, before you embark 215 216 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME on a journey the terrors of whatever may overtake you on that journey live in the imagination and paralyze you. It was through Moses, according to legend, that they discovered, by undertaking this journey, how much they could endure. These speculations have led me a little bit ahead of myself. I suppose it can be said that there was a time in this country when an entity existed which could be called the majority, let's say a class, for the lack of a better word, which created the standards by which the country lived or which created the standards to which the country aspired. I am referring or have in mind, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, the aristocracies ofVir ginia and New England. These were mainly of Anglo-Saxon stock and they created what Henry James was to refer to, not very much later, as our Anglo-American heritage, or Anglo American connections. Now at no time did these men ever form anything resembling a popular majority. Their impor tance was that they kept alive and they bore witness to two elements of a man's life which are not greatly respected among us now: (1) the social forms, called manners, which prevent us fr om rubbing too abrasively against one another and (2) the interior life, or the life of the mind. These things were im portant; these things were realities for them and no matter how roughhewn or dark the country was then, it is important to remember that this was also the time when people sat up in log cabins studying very hard by lamplight or candlelight. That they were better educated than we are now can be proved by comparing the political speeches of that time with those of our own day. Now, what I have been trying to suggest in all this is that the only useful definition of the word "majority" does not refer to numbers, and it docs not refer to power. It refers to influence.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Dante Evans was a fourteen-year-old child living in a FEMA trailer with his abusive father in Gulfport, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina. His dad, who had twice before nearly killed Dante’s mother, was shot by Dante while he slept in a chair. Dante had repeatedly told school officials about his father’s abuse, but no one ever intervened. I discussed Dante’s prior diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder following the attempted murder of his mother in my oral argument before the Mississippi Supreme Court. The Court emphasized the trial court’s refusal to permit introduction of this evidence and granted Dante a new trial. — Our death penalty work had also taken a hopeful turn. The number of death row prisoners in Alabama for whom we’d won relief reached one hundred. We had created a new community of formerly condemned prisoners in Alabama who had been illegally convicted or sentenced and received new trials or sentencing hearings. Most never returned to death row. Starting in 2012, we had eighteen months with no executions in Alabama. Continued litigation about lethal injection protocols and other questions about the reliability of the death penalty slowed the execution rate in Alabama dramatically. In 2013, Alabama recorded the lowest number of new death sentences since the resumption of capital punishment in the mid-1970s. These were very hopeful developments. Of course, there were still challenges. I was losing sleep over another man on Alabama’s death row, a man who was clearly innocent. Anthony Ray Hinton was on death row when Walter McMillian arrived in the 1980s. Mr. Hinton was wrongly convicted of two robbery-murders outside Birmingham after state forensic employees mistakenly concluded that a gun recovered from his mother’s home had been used in the crimes. Mr. Hinton’s appointed defense lawyer got only $500 from the court to retain a gun expert to confront the state’s case, so he ended up with a mechanical engineer who was blind in one eye and who had almost no experience testifying as a gun expert.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Huey, on that day, the day which prompted Bobby Seale to describe Huey as "the baddest motherfucker in history," re stored to the men and women of the ghetto their honor. And, for this reason, the Panthers, far fr om being an illegal or a lawless organization, are a great force for peace and stability in the ghetto. But, as this suggests an unprecedented measure of autonomy for the ghetto citizens, no one in authority is prepared to face this overwhelmingly obvious fact. White America remains unable to believe that black America's griev ances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incompre hension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young. No one is more aware of this than the Black Panther leadership. This is why they are so anxious to create work and study programs in the ghetto-everything fr om hot lunches for school children to academic courses in high schools and colleges to the content, format, and distri bution of the Black Panther newspapers. All of these are an tidotes to the demoralization which is the scourge of the ghetto, are techniques of self-realization. This is also why they are taught to bear arms-not, like most white Americans, be cause they fear their neighbors, though indeed they have the + 56 NO NAME IN THE STREET most to fear, but in order, this time, to protect their lives, their women and children, their homes, rather than the life and property of an Uncle Sam who has rarely been able to treat his black nephews with more than a vaguely benign con tempt. For the necessity, now, which I think nearly all black people see in different ways, is the creation and protection of a nucleus which will bring into existence a new people. The Black Panthers made themselves visible-made them selves targets, if you like-in order to hip the black community to the presence of a new force in its midst, a force working toward the health and liberation of the community. It was a force which set itself in opposition to that force which uses people as things and which grinds down men and women and children, not only in the ghetto, into an unrecognizable pow der. They announced themselves especially as a force for the rehabilitation of the young-the young who were simply per ishing, in and out of schools, on the needle, in the Army, or in prison.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  This is a very serious issue for the future, considering how long people are living and how much they will need to turn to their children for loving care and support in their old age. 4 A LMOST ALL THE young adults from divorced families in our group knew their father’s address at the twenty-five-year mark, but unlike Gary and his dad, most were not close friends. Their relationship was very different from those in the good intact families where fathers and adult sons grew closer and both valued the relationship more as the father aged. Few divorced fathers were good friends with their adult children. Fathers and sons did keep in touch and come together for important family events, such as the birth of new children, birthdays, holidays, and sometimes regular visits with grandchildren. A few fathers and sons played golf or tennis regularly. Over the years, fathers who had disappointed their children were observed from afar for any sign of increased interest in their adult children. “I think he’s beginning to mellow,” they reported. The way that adult sons were able to hold on to their hope and compassion was very moving. Some went in search of fathers they had seen only rarely and tried hard to find points in common. One thirty-year-old man remembered the airplane models that he and his dad had built together when he was a little boy. He purchased several model sets and invited his father to join him in model building in the hope that they could go back and retrieve their old ties. Sam, a thirty-one-year-old photographer, said, “I keep in touch with him. He’s getting older now and maybe more reliable. He abandoned me, I know that. But there’s no point getting sad or pissed off. People do what they have to do.” Here I’d like to point out a strange phenomenon that baffles many observers of our divorce culture. I have met men who were good, loyal, decent fathers to the children born in a second marriage or to stepchildren from the remarriage. If you asked those children about their dad, they’d say he was the best in the world. Yet this same man a few years earlier walked away from the children in his first marriage. They’d say he was the worst dad in the world. How could one person behave so differently? One such father in the study explained his behavior when he said, “I wasn’t happy in my previous marriage. I never felt that my first wife belonged to me. The marriage was so terrible, I became disgusted, and after a while I didn’t try. It ended. I had two children. My son was seven when I left. So he doesn’t think much of me. I literally packed and left in front of him, which is very hurtful to a child. I know that. Whatever feelings he harbors toward me to this day I understand.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  However, there are quasi-integral and potential parts assigned to it: integral parts, with regard to those things the concurrence of which is requisite for an act of fortitude; and potential parts, because what fortitude practices in face of the greatest hardships, namely dangers of death, certain other virtues practice in the matter of certain minor hardships and these virtues are annexed to fortitude as secondary virtues to the principal virtue. As stated above ([3338]Q[123], AA[3],6), the act of fortitude is twofold, aggression and endurance. Now two things are required for the act of aggression. The first regards preparation of the mind, and consists in one’s having a mind ready for aggression. In this respect Tully mentions “confidence,” of which he says (De Invent. Rhet. ii) that “with this the mind is much assured and firmly hopeful in great and honorable undertakings.” The second regards the accomplishment of the deed, and consists in not failing to accomplish what one has confidently begun. In this respect Tully mentions “magnificence,” which he describes as being “the discussion and administration,” i.e. accomplishment “of great and lofty undertakings, with a certain broad and noble purpose of mind,” so as to combine execution with greatness of purpose. Accordingly if these two be confined to the proper matter of fortitude, namely to dangers of death, they will be quasi-integral parts thereof, because without them there can be no fortitude; whereas if they be referred to other matters involving less hardship, they will be virtues specifically distinct from fortitude, but annexed thereto as secondary virtues to principal: thus “magnificence” is referred by the Philosopher (Ethic. iv) to great expenses, and “magnanimity,” which seems to be the same as confidence, to great honors. Again, two things are requisite for the other act of fortitude, viz. endurance. The first is that the mind be not broken by sorrow, and fall away from its greatness, by reason of the stress of threatening evil. In this respect he mentions “patience,” which he describes as “the voluntary and prolonged endurance of arduous and difficult things for the sake of virtue or profit.” The other is that by the prolonged suffering of hardships man be not wearied so as to lose courage, according to Heb. 12:3, “That you be not wearied, fainting in your minds.” In this respect he mentions “perseverance,” which accordingly he describes as “the fixed and continued persistence in a well considered purpose.” If these two be confined to the proper matter of fortitude, they will be quasi-integral parts thereof; but if they be referred to any kind of hardship they will be virtues distinct from fortitude, yet annexed thereto as secondary to principal. Reply to Objection 1: Magnificence in the matter of liberality adds a certain greatness: this is connected with the notion of difficulty which is the object of the irascible faculty, that is perfected chiefly by fortitude: and to this virtue, in this respect, it belongs.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. This action of Christ’s has a figurative meaning pertaining to all who were after Him to be baptized; and therefore he says, straightway He ascended, and not simply He ascended, for all who are worthily baptized in Christ, straightway ascend from the water; that is, make progress in virtues, and are carried on towards a heavenly dignity. They who had gone down to the water carnal and sinful sons of Adam, straightway ascend from the water spiritual sons of God. But if some by their own faults make no progress after baptism, what is that to the baptism? RABANUS. As by the immersion of His body He dedicated the laver of baptism, He has shewn that to us also after baptism received the entrance to heaven is open, and the Holy Spirit is given, as it follows, and the heavens were opened. JEROME. Not by an actual cleaving of the visible element, but to the spiritual eye, as Ezekiel also in the beginning of his book relates that he saw them. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. For had the actual creation of the heavens been opened, he would not have said were opened to Him, for a physical opening would have been open to all. But some one will say, What, are the heavens then closed to the eye of the Son of God, who even when on earth is present in heaven? But it must be known, that as He was baptized according to the ordinance of humanity that He had taken on Him, so the heavens were opened to His sight as to His human nature, though as to His divine He was in heaven. REMIGIUS. But was this then the first time that the heavens were opened to Him according to His human nature? The faith of the Church both believes and holds that the heavens were no less open to Him before than after. It is therefore said here, that the heavens were opened, because to all them who are born again the door of the kingdom of heaven is opened.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. He restored her to life not by bringing in another soul, but by recalling that which had departed, and as it were raising it from sleep, and through this sight preparing the way for belief of the resurrection. And He not only restores her to life, but commands food to be given her, as the other Evangelists relate, that that which was done might be seen to be no delusion. And the fame of him went abroad into all that country. GLOSS. (non occ.) The fame, namely, of the greatness and novelty of the miracle, and its established truth; so that it could not be supposed to be a forgery. HILARY. Mystically; The Lord enters the ruler’s house, that is, the synagogue, throughout which there resounded in the songs of the Law a strain of wailing. JEROME. To this day the damsel lays dead in the ruler’s house; and they that seem to be teachers are but minstrels singing funeral dirges. The Jews also are not the crowd of believers, but of people making a noise. But when the fulness of the Gentiles shall come in, then all Israel shall be saved. HILARY. But that the number of the elect might be known to be but few out of the whole body of believers, the multitude is put forth; the Lord indeed would that they should be saved, but they mocked at His sayings and actions, and so were not worthy to be made partakers of His resurrection. JEROME. He took her by the hand, and the maid arose; because if the hands of the Jews which are defiled with blood be not first cleansed, their synagogue which is dead shall not revive. HILARY. His fame went about into all that country; that is, the salvation of the elect, the gift and works of Christ are preached. RABANUS. Morally; The damsel dead in the house is the soul dead in thought. He says that she is asleep, because they that are now asleep in sin may yet be roused by penitence. The minstrels are flatterers who cherish the dead. GREGORY. (Mor. xviii. 43.) The multitude are put forth that the damsel may be raised; for unless the multitude of worldly cares is first banished from the secrets of the heart, the soul which is laid dead within, cannot rise again. RABANUS. The maiden is raised in the house with few to witness, the young man without the gate, and Lazarus in the presence of many; for a public scandal requires a public expiation; a less notorious, a lesser remedy; and secret sins may be done away by penitence. 9:27–3127. And when Jesus departed thence, two blind men followed him, crying, and saying, Thou Son of David, have mercy on us. 28. And when he was come into the house, the blind men came to him: and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? They said unto him, Yea, Lord.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I might have pitied them if I had DOWN AT THE CROSS 3 1 5 not found myself in their hands so often and discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held the power and what they were like when you held the power. The behavior of the crowd, its silent intensity, was the other thing that forced me to reassess the speakers and their mes sage. I sometimes think, with despair, that Americans will swallow whole any political speech whatever-we've been do ing very little else, these last, bad years-so it may not mean anything to say that this sense of integrity, after what Harlem, especially, has been through in the way of demagogues, was a very startling change. Still, the speakers had an air of utter dedication, and the people looked toward them with a kind of intelligence of hope on their fa ces-not as though they were being consoled or drugged but as though they were be ing jolted. Power was the subject of the speeches I heard. We were offered, as Nation of Islam doctrine, historical and divine proof that all white people arc cursed, and are devils, and are about to be brought down. This has been revealed by Allah Himself to His prophet, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The white man's rule will be ended forever in ten or fifteen years (and it must be conceded that all present signs would seem to bear witness to the accuracy of the prophet's state ment). The crowd seemed to swallow this theology with no effort-all crowds do swallow theology this way, I gather, in both sides of Jerusalem, in Istanbul, and in Rome-and, as theology goes, it was no more indigestible than the more fa miliar brand asserting that there is a curse on the sons of Ham. No more, and no less, and it had been designed tor the same purpose; namely, the sanctification of power. But very little time was spent on theology, for one did not need to prove to a Harlem audience that all white men were devils. They were merely glad to have, at last, divine corroboration of their ex perience, to hear-and it was a tremendous thing to hear that they had been lied to fo r all these years and generations, and that their captivity was ending, fo r God was black.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I drove to the prison to deliver the news. Walter didn’t say anything as I explained the situation, but he had a strange, despairing look on his face. I had tried to prepare him for the possibility that it could take years to get his conviction overturned, but he had gotten his hopes up. “They aren’t ever going to admit they made a mistake,” he said glumly. “They know I didn’t do this. They just can’t admit to being wrong, to looking bad.” “We’re just getting started, Walter,” I replied. “There is a lot more to do, and we’re going to make them confront this.” I was telling the truth: We did have to press on. Our plan was to ask the Court of Criminal Appeals to reconsider its decision, and if that turned out to be a dead end, we would seek review in the Alabama Supreme Court. And we had uncovered even more evidence of Walter’s innocence. After filing the appeal brief, I’d continued investigating the case intensively. If we hadn’t come up with so much new evidence to prove Walter’s innocence, I think the court’s ruling would have been even more overwhelming. I told Walter before I left the prison, “They don’t know what we now know about your innocence. As soon as we present the new evidence to them, they’ll think differently.” My hopefulness was genuine, in spite of everything that had happened already. But I was underestimating the resistance we would face. I’d finally been able to hire some additional lawyers for the organization, which gave me more time to investigate Walter’s case. One of my new hires was Michael O’Connor, a recent Yale Law School graduate with a passion for helping people in trouble that had been kindled by his own struggles earlier in life. The son of Irish immigrants, Michael had grown up outside of Philadelphia in a tough working-class neighborhood. When his high school friends started experimenting with hard drugs, so did Mike, and he soon developed a heroin addiction. His life descended into a nightmare of drug dependency and chaos, complete with the growing risk of death by overdose. For several years he floated from one crisis to another until the overdose death of a close friend motivated him to crawl his way back to sobriety. Throughout all of this heartache, his family had never abandoned him. They helped him stabilize his life and find his way back to college. At Penn State he revealed himself to be a brilliant student, graduating summa cum laude. His academic credentials got him into Yale Law School, but his heart was still connected to all the brokenness his years on the street had shown him.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I began getting letters from Karen Kelly after our visit. She wanted me to tell Walter how sorry she was about what had happened to him. She said she still cared about him a great deal. It wasn’t clear what we could expect from Karen if we got a new hearing in court, other than to confirm that Ralph had never met Walter. It was clear that she saw Walter as the kind of person who would never kill someone violently, which was consistent with the opinion of everyone who knew him. She hadn’t dealt with the police much around the Morrison murder and didn’t have useful information pointing to their misconduct, aside from being able to show how they were provoked by her relationship with Walter. Michael and I decided to spend more time looking into the Pittman murder; we thought it might give us some perspective on the coercion that was leveled against Myers. We now knew that because Myers had recanted his accusations against Walter before the trial, the State might not be entirely surprised to hear that he was denying McMillian’s involvement in the crime. We needed as much objective evidence as we could find to confirm the truth of what Myers was now saying. Understanding the Pittman case and documenting the other demonstrably false things Myers had asserted would strengthen our evidence. Vickie Pittman’s murder had been all but forgotten. Monroe County officials had reduced Myers’s and Kelly’s sentences in exchange for Myers’s testimony against Walter. How they managed to reduce sentences in the Pittman case, which was outside their jurisdiction in another county, was another anomaly. Myers insisted that there were other people besides him and Kelly involved in the Pittman murder, including a corrupt local sheriff. There were still questions about why Vickie Pittman had been killed. Myers told us that her murder had everything to do with drug debts and threats she had made to expose corruption. We had learned from some of the early police reports that the father of Vickie Pittman, Vic Pittman, had been implicated as a suspect in her death. Vickie Pittman had had two aunts, Mozelle and Onzelle, who had been collecting information and desperately seeking answers to the questions surrounding their niece’s death. We reached out to them on the off chance that they’d be willing to speak with us, and we were astounded when they eagerly agreed to talk. Mozelle and Onzelle were twin sisters—they were also colorful, opinionated talkers who could be bracingly direct. The two middle-aged, rural white women spent so much time together that they could finish each other’s sentences without even seeming to notice. They described themselves as “country tough” and presented themselves as fearless, relentless women who could not be intimidated. “Just so you know: We’re gun owners, so don’t bring no drama when you come.” This was Mozelle’s last warning before I hung up the phone with her the first time we talked.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  It was gratifying to be able, finally, to address some of these issues through our new project and to articulate the challenges created by racial history and structural poverty. The materials we developed were generating positive feedback, and I became hopeful that we might be able to push back against the suppression of this difficult history of racial injustice. — I was also encouraged by our new staff. We were now attracting young, gifted lawyers from all over the country who are extremely skilled. We started a program for college graduates to work at EJI as Justice Fellows. Having a bigger staff with very talented people made meeting the new challenges created by our much broader docket seem possible. A bigger staff, bigger cases, and a bigger docket also sometimes meant bigger problems. While exciting and very gratifying, the Supreme Court rulings on juveniles created all sorts of new challenges for us. Hundreds of people were now entitled to pursue new sentences, and most were in states where they had no clear right to counsel. In states like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, there were hundreds of people whose cases were affected by the recent decisions, but no lawyers were available to assist these condemned juvenile lifers. We ended up taking on almost one hundred new cases following the court’s ban on life imprisonment without parole for kids convicted of non-homicide offenses. We then took on another hundred new cases after the decision banning mandatory life without parole for juveniles. In addition to the dozens of cases already on our juvenile docket, we were quickly overwhelmed. The total ban on life-without-parole sentences for children convicted of non-homicides should have been the easiest decision to implement, but enforcing the Supreme Court’s ruling was proving much more difficult than I had hoped. I was spending more and more time in Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia, which together had close to 90 percent of the non-homicide cases. The trial courts were often less sophisticated in thinking about the differences between children and adults than we had hoped, and we would often have to relitigate the basic unfairness of treating kids like adults that the Supreme Court had already recognized. Some judges seemed to want to get as close to life expectancy or natural death as possible before they would create release opportunities for child offenders. Antonio Nuñez’s judge in Orange County, California, replaced his sentence of life imprisonment without parole with a sentence of 175 years. I had to go back to an appellate court in California and argue to get that sentence replaced with a reasonable sentence. We met resistance in Joe Sullivan’s and Ian Manuel’s cases as well. Ultimately, we were able to get sentences that meant they could both be released after serving a few more years.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary, and this revelation invests the victim with patience. Furthermore, it is ultimately fatal to create too many victims. The victor can do nothing with these victims, for they do not belong to him, but-to the victims. They belong to the peo ple he is fighting. The people know this, and as inexorably as the roll call-the honor roll-of victims expands, so does their will become inexorable: they resolve that these dead, their brethren, shall not have died in vain. When this point is reached, however long the battle may go on, the victor can never be the victor: on the contrary, all his energies, his entire TO BE BAPTIZED 4- 0 7 life, are bound up in a terror he cannot articulate, a mystery he cannot read, a battle he cannot win-he has simply become the prisoner of the people he thought to cow, chain, or mur der into submission. Power, then, which can have no morality in itself� is yet dependent on human energy, on the wills and desires of hu man beings. When power translates itself into tyranny, it means that the principles on which that power depended, and which were its justification, are bankrupt. When this happens, and it is happening now, power can only be defended by thugs and mediocrities-and seas of blood. The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young; while the excluded begin to re alize, having endured everything, that they can endure every thing. They do not know the precise shape of the future, but they know that the future belongs to them. They realize this paradoxically-by the failure of the moral energy of their op pressors and begin, almost instinctively, to forge a new morality, to create the principles on which a new world will be built. My sister, Paula, and my brother, David, and I lived to gether in London tor a while in 1968. London was very peace ful, partly because we hardly ever went out. The house was big, so that we were not on top of each other, and all of us could cook. Besides, going out was hazardous. London was reacting to its accelerating racial problem and compounding the disaster by denying that it had one. My famous face cre ated a certain kind of hazard-or hazards: tor example, I re member a girl sitting next to me in a cinema suddenly seeing me in the light from the match with which she was lighting her cigarette. She stared and shook-1 could not tell whether she was about to cry Rape! or ask tor an autograph. In the event, she moved away.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one 34-2 THE FIRE NEXT TIME holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful com munion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks-the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. Why, for example--especially knowing the family as I do-l should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine. In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here ifwc are really to become a nation-ifwc arc really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white. But white men with far more po litical power than that possessed by the Nation of Islam movement have been advocating exactly this, in effect, for generations. If this sentiment is honored when it falls fr om the lips of Senator Byrd, then there is no reason it should not be honored when it falls fr om the lips of Malcolm X. And any Congressional committee wishing to investigate the latter must also be willing to investigate the former.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It did occur, and is occurring all up and down Amer ica, as I write, and is crossing borders and being exported to various "underdeveloped" portions of the globe. But this en deavor cannot succeed, with force or without it, because the center of the earth has shifted. The British Prime Minister, for example, is a grotesque anachronism, and the world is not holding its breath waiting to see what will happen in England; England's future will be determined by what is happening in the world. I am speaking of the breakup-the end-of the so-overex tended Western empire. I am thinking of the black and non white peoples who are shattering, redefining and re-creating history-making all things new-simply by declaring their presence, by delivering their testimony. The empire never in tended that this testimony should be heard, but, if I hold my peace, the very stones JVill cry out. One can speak, then, of the fall of an empire at that moment when, though all of the paraphernalia of power remain intact and visible and seem to function, neither the citizen-subject within the gates nor the indescribable hordes outside it believe in the morality or the reality of the kingdom anymore-when no one, any longer, anywhere, aspires to the empire's stan dards. This is the charged, the dangerous, moment, when every thing must be re-examined, must be made new; when nothing at all can be taken for granted. One looks again at the word "famine." At this hour ofthe world's history, famine must be considered a man-made phenomenon and one looks at who is starving. There is nothing even faintly ridiculous, or unfair, in these apprehensions, which arc produced by nothing less than Western history. Our former guides and masters are among the most ruthless creatures in mankind's history, slaughtering and starving one another to death long before they discovered the blacks. If the British were willing to starve Ireland to death-which they did, in order to protect the prof· its of British merchants-why would the West be reluctant to starve Africa out of existence? Especially since the generation THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE 80 7 facing famine now is precisely that generation that will begin the real and final liberation of Mrica fr om Europe. It is, in any case, perfectly clear that the earth's populations can be fed if-or, rather, when-we alter our priorities. We can irrigate deserts and feed the entire earth tor the price we arc paying to build bombs that we will be able to usc, in any event, only once; after which whoever is left will have to begin doing what I am suggesting now.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  It mattered little to me that the accord obtained was external, imposed from without and perhaps temporary; I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself. Since hatred, stupidity, and delirium have lasting effects, I saw no reason why good will, clarity of mind and just practice would not have their effects, too. Order on the frontiers was nothing if I could not persuade a Jewish peddler and a Greek grocer to live peaceably side by side. Peace was my aim, but not at all my idol; even to call it my ideal would displease me as too remote from reality. I had considered going so far in my refusal of conquests as to abandon Dacia, and would have done so had it been prudent to break openly with the policy of my predecessor; but it was better to utilize as wisely as possible those gains acquired before my accession and already recorded by history. The admirable Julius Bassus, first governor of that newly organized province, had died in his labors there, as I myself had almost succumbed in my year on the Sarmatian frontiers, exhausted by the thankless task of endless pacification in a country which had supposedly been subdued. I ordered a funeral triumph for him in Rome, an honor reserved ordinarily only for emperors; this homage to a good servitor sacrificed in obscurity was my last, and indirect, protest against the policy of conquest; nor had I need to denounce it publicly from the time that I was empowered to cut it short. On the other hand, military measures had to be taken in Mauretania, where agents of Lusius Quietus were fomenting revolt; nothing, however, required my immediate presence there. It was the same in Britain, where the Caledonians had taken advantage of withdrawal of troops for the war in Asia to decimate the reduced garrisons left on the frontiers. Julius Severus saw to what was most urgent there while awaiting the time when restoration of order in Roman affairs would permit me to undertake that long voyage. But I greatly desired to take charge myself in the Sarmatian war, which had been left inconclusive, and this time to throw in the number of troops requisite to make an end of barbarian depredations. For I refused, here as everywhere, to subject myself to a system.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Not that pie in the sky stuff, not a preference for optimism over pessimism, but rather “an orientation of the spirit.” The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong. Havel prescribed exactly what our work seemed to require. Walter’s case had needed it more than most. So I didn’t discourage Minnie. Together, we hoped. — On February 23, nearly six weeks after getting the ABI’s report, I received a call from the clerk of the court informing us that the Court of Criminal Appeals had ruled in the McMillian case and that we could pick up the opinion. “You’re going to like this,” she said cryptically. I ran over to the courthouse and was out of breath by the time I sat down to read the thirty-five-page ruling. The clerk was right. The ruling invalidated Walter’s conviction and death sentence. The court didn’t conclude that he was innocent and must be released, but it ruled in our favor on every other claim and ordered a new trial. I didn’t realize how much I had feared that we would lose until we finally won. I jumped into the car and raced down to death row to tell Walter in person. I watched him take it all in. He leaned back and gave me a familiar chuckle. “Well,” he said slowly, “you know, that’s good. That’s good.” “Good? It’s great!” “Yeah, it is great.” He was grinning now with a freedom I hadn’t seen before. “Whew, man, I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it….Whew!” His smile started to fade, and he began slowly shaking his head. “Six years, six years gone.” He looked away with a pained expression. “These six years feel like fifty. Six years, just gone. I’ve been so worried they were going to kill me, I haven’t even thought about the time I’ve lost.” His troubled look sobered me, too. “I know, Walter, and we’re not clear yet,” I said. “The ruling only gives you a new trial. Given what the ABI has said, I can’t believe they would try to prosecute you again, but with this crowd reasonable conduct is never guaranteed. I’m going to try and get you home as soon as humanly possible.” With thoughts of home, his mood lightened and we started talking about things we’d been too afraid to discuss since we’d met. He said, “I want to meet everybody who has helped me in Montgomery. And I want to go around with you and tell the world what they did to me.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Stories have a claim, just as much as formal philosophical literature, to a privileged place in the history of sexuality. The narrative literature of the late classical world proved capable, like no other medium, of representing the pattern and experience of sexual morality, measured against the shape of life. The collective body of texts, and the literary syntax shared between them, seems to speak to us directly—especially in the hands of the authors who understood the mechanics and conventionality of their stories most profoundly. In the late classical world, the shared syntax of narrative changed. The structural transformation that enabled the creation of characters like Pelagia and Mary traces the deeper reordering of the form and logic of sexual morality. A romance like Leucippe and Clitophon was possible because—even if the author is smirking or sneering—ultimately the romance belonged to a world where individual sexual morality was locked within and subordinate to systems of valuation that were external, objective, and social. The self, with its uncanny eroticism, was constituted by its place in the harmonious synthesis of nature and society that the ancient city had achieved. A romance like the Life of Mary of Egypt was possible because sexual morality was now a troublesome inheritance of the flesh, in a universe whose true scale of values lay in the hope of the spirit to transcend its embodiment. CONCLUSION Sex and the Twilight of Antiquity

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Wallace. Since this quartet included two of my brothers, I was given the details of the trip; indeed, David, the younger, kept a sort of journal for me-literally a blow-by-blo w account. Harlem is filled with churches and on Sundays it gives the impression of being filled with music. Quartets such as my brothers' travel from church to church in the fashion of circuit preachers, singing as much for the love of singing and the need for practice as for the rather indifferent sums collected for them which arc then divided. These quartets have "battles of song," the winning team adding, of course, immensely to its prestige, the most consistent winners being the giants in this field. The aim of all these quartets, of course, is to branch out, to hit the big time and sing for a livelihood. The Golden Gate Quartet, judging at lea st from its music, had its roots here, and out of such a background came Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whom I heard, not quite ten years ago, plunking a guitar in a store-f ront church on Fifth Avenue. The Melodeers have not been singing very long and arc very far from well known, and the invitation to sing on tour with the Wallace party in the South seemed, whatever their misgivings about the Mason-Di xon line, too good an opportunity to pass up . This invitation, by the way, seems to have been the brain storm of a Clarence Warde, a Negro merchant seaman once employed as a cottage father in a corrective institution up state; it was he in New York who acted as a go-between, ar ranging, since The Melodeers arc minors, to be their legal guardian and manager on the road. An extended tour, such as was planned, met with some opposition from the parents, an opposition countered by the possible long-term benefits of the tour in so far as the boys' careers were concerned and, even more urgently, by the assurance that, at the very least, the boys would come home with a considerably larger sum of money than any of them were making on their jobs. (The political implications do not seem to have carried much weight.) A series of churches had been lined up for them pre sumably throughout the South. "The understanding," writes David, "was that we were supposed to sing"; after which the ;8 NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON party was to take over to make speeches and circulate peti tions. "The arrangement," David notes laconically, "sounded \·cry promising, so we decided to go." And, indeed, they traveled South in splendor, in a Pullman, to be exact, in which, since what David describes as a "South ern gentleman and wife" took exception to their presence, they tra\'clcd alone. At the Wallace headquarters in Atlanta they were intro duced to a Mrs. Branson Price, a grey-h aired white woman of incurably aristocratic leanings who seems to have been the directress of the party in that region.