Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“Another advantage I gained in my new master was, he made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion; and this, in my opinion, was truly a great advantage. I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.”
― Joan Didion, South and West: From a Notebook

“There is a much-loved region in the American fantasy where pale white women float eternally under black magnolia trees, and white men with soft hands brush wisps of wisteria from the creamy shoulders of their lady loves. Harmonious black music drifts like perfume through this precious air, and nothing of a threatening nature intrudes.

The South I returned to, however, was flesh-real and swollen-belly poor.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Despite the sarcastic remarks of Northerners, who don't know the region (read Easterners, Westerners, North Easterners, North Westerners, Midwesterners), the South of the United States can be so impellingly beautiful that sophisticated creature comforts diminish in importance.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Whenever I hear protests from the South that it should be left alone to deal with the Negro question, my thoughts go back to that scene of brutality and savagery. I do not see how a people that can find in its conscience any excuse whatever for slowly burning to death a human being, or for tolerating such an act, can be entrusted with the salvation of a race.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“The South lost ... and that is good ... and that hateful flag needs to come down ... and reparations need to be offered and if none of that can happen ... well ... let there be poetry”
― Nikki Giovanni, Acolytes

“The Southern whites are not yet living quite in the present age; many of their general ideas hark back to a former century, some of them to the Dark Ages. In the light of other days they are sometimes magnificent. Today they are often cruel and ludicrous.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“The escape from industrialism is not in socialism or in Sovietism. The answer lies in a return to a society where agriculture is practiced by most of the people. It is in fact impossible for any culture to be sound and healthy without a proper regard for the soil, no matter how many urban dwellers think that their food comes from grocers and delicatessens, or their milk from tin cans. This ignorance does not release them from a final dependence upon the farm and that most incorrigible of beings, the farmer.”
― Andrew Lytle

“Folks had draped strange flags over their iron porticoes with drawings of pineapples and the word WELCOME. The South was like that, festive but impenetrable.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success

“The rest of the world points an angry finger at the South. The rest of the world sees the cinders only in the eyes of southerners. The rest of the world refuses to see the soot in its own eyes.

The South, in attitude and in effect, is probably not much worse than the North--only in degree and display. It's simply that the South has always been honest about its hatred and its prejudice. Northern intolerance has been subtle, therefore more pernicious and snaring.”
― Eddy L. Harris, South of Haunted Dreams: A Memoir

“But the one thing all of the people in the Ape Yard had in common was that they were trapped, caught in that basin of poverty and servitude to Doc Bobo in the hollow, and held in place by the weight of the white structure beyond. For them, escape seemed futile at the outset.”
― Jeff Fields, A Cry of Angels

“Birmingham has proved that no matter what you're up against, if wave after wave of black people keep coming prepared to go to jail, sooner or later there is such confusion, such social dislocation, that white people in the South are faced with a choice: either integrated restaurants or no restaurants at all, integrated public facilities or none at all. And the South then must make its choice for integration, for it would rather have that than chaos.

This struggle is only beginning in the North, but it will be a bitter struggle. It will be an attack on business, on trade unions, and on the government. The Negro will no longer tolerate a situation where for every white man unemployed there are two or three Negroes unemployed. In the North, Negroes present a growing threat to the social order that, less brutally and more subtly than the South, attempts to keep him "in his place." In response, moderates today warn of the danger of violence and "extremism" but do not attempt to change conditions that brutalize the Negro and breed racial conflict. What is needed is an ongoing massive assault on racist political power and institutions.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“I tried to go to a counselor, but it was just too weird. Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit. I did go to the library...”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“As I increasingly saw Mom's behavior in myself, I tried to understand her.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“We hit slavery through a great civil war. Did we destroy it? No, we only changed it into hatred between sections of the country: in the South, into political corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation of the public conscience, and the ever over-hanging dread of what the future may bring.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“We leave, we run away and don't realize how much we'll need to go back home one day. The South is like that. It's the worst mama in the world and it's the best mama in the world.”
― Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories

“Why should I fight to uphold the system that cast me out? I shall take pleasure in seeing it smashed.'

'I never heard of any system,' she said crossly.

'No? And yet you are a part of it, like I was, and I'll wager you don't like it any more than I did. Well, why am I the black sheep of the butler family? For this reason and no other-I didn't conform to Charleston and I couldn't. And Charleston is the South, only intensified. I wonder if you realize yet what a bore it is? So many things that one must do because they've always been done. So many things, quite harmless, that one must not do for the same reason. So many things that annoyed me by their senselessness. not marrying the young lady, of whom you have probably heard, was merely the last straw. Why should I marry a boring fool, simply because an accident prevented me from getting her home before dark? And why permit her wild-eyed brother to shoot and kill me, when I could shoot straighter? If I had been a gentleman, of course, I would have let him kill me and that would have wiped the blot from the Butler escutcheon. But-I like to live. And so I've lived and I've had a good time. . . . When I think of my brother, living among t he sacred cows of Charleston, and most reverent toward them, and remember his stodgy wife and his Saint Cecilia Balls and his everlasting rice fields-then I know the compensation for breaking with the system. Scarlett, our Southern way of living is as antiquated as the feudal system of the Middle Ages. The wonder is that it's lasted as long as it has. It had to go and it's going now. And yet you expect me to listen to orators like Dr. Meade who tell me our Cause is just and holy? And get so excited by the roll of drums that I'll grab a musket and rush off to Virginia to shed my blood for Marse Robert? What kind of a fool do you think I am? Kissing the rod that chastised me is not in my line. The South and I are even now. The South threw me out to starve once. I haven't starved, and I am making enough money out of the South's death throes to compensate me for my lost birthright.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity."

Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“What is that statue?" I asked. "A Civil War general--probably Lee's," Amzie said. "What else is on the courthouse lawn?" The statue stood on one side of the entrance and a beautiful tree on the other. "What kind of tree is that?" I asked. "I don't know for sure," Amzie replied, "but I think it's an oak. Big, ain't it? Strong, too. Been there a long time."

For a moment he sat still and full of thoughts. "Let's look around town," I said. "Wait," he replied. "You just gave me a thought. There's a picture of the South if I ever saw one. That Southern general and that tree. One is the dead past and the other the living present. This South is sure caught in between--between life and death.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“Let us turn our gaze towards the Southern lands, where only the melancholy light of origins shines.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“The conjunction of the 'straightest', most austere product of the Northern hemisphere—the presbyterian, the Anglo-Saxon, the quintessential hyperborean, in his pride and his theology—and the most primitive, regressive, impotent and also the most unselfconscious element that the Antipodes concealed under the sun: the Aboriginals. The clash resulted in the quasi-total extermination of the Antipodean, but the Southern hemisphere has not perhaps pronounced its last word yet.

The Aboriginals were certainly had. They were led to claim for themselves stretches of land which in the days when they had been left alone they had roamed through as nomads with never a thought of ownership. Their claim was directed towards an object they had never possessed and which they would have thought it contemptible and sacrilegious to possess. Typical Western cunning. In return they have palmed off an even deadlier virus on to us—the virus of origins.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Since I saw them pictures a while back on the front page of The New York Times of that police dog in Birmingham biting a young black student in the stomach, I have ceased to like white folks," said Simple.

"As bad as Birmingham is," I said, "surely you do not blame white people in New York or Detroit or San Francisco for that Alabama dog."

"I do," said Simple, "because white folks is in the majority every-where. They control the government in Washington, and if they let such doings go on in this American country, such as has been going on in Alabama and Mississippi, I blame them all. If white folks was bit by police dogs and prodded with electric rods, you can bet your bottom dollar something would be done about it—and quick—before you could say Jackie Robinson."

"You are no doubt right," I said, "but as long as they themselves are not bitten by dogs and prodded by electric rods and denied the right to march or to vote, most white folks in the North will do very little to help Southern Negroes."

"And I will do very little toward loving them," said Simple.”
― Langston Hughes, The Return of Simple

“Adventure is a great thing," said Simple, "which should be in everybody's life. According to 'The Late Late Show' on TV, in the old days when Americans headed West in covered wagons, they was almost sure to run into adventure--at the very least a battle with the Red Skins. Nowadays, if you want to run into adventure, go to Alabama or Mississippi, where you can battle with the White Skins.”
― Langston Hughes, The Return of Simple

“As for reading books, even far-out books, even beatnik books, fine. Only there are not enough books for me down South, which is one reason I came to New York.”
― Langston Hughes, The Return of Simple

“...Don't tell me ofays don't own the world."

"That doesn't necessarily mean they are going to keep it forever," I said, competing with the music on the juke box and the noise at the bar. "The colonial system is bound to come to an end."

"When?" asked Simple.

"Before long. The British Empire is on its last legs. The Dutch haven't got much left."

"But the crackers still have Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and Washington, D.C.," said Simple.

"I admit that, but when we start voting in greater numbers down South, and using the ballot as we ought to up North, they won't be as strong as they might have been.”
― Langston Hughes, The Return of Simple

“The Island of Hawaii has a very strange property market. In the north you will find some of the most expensive homes in the USA and in the south they among the cheapest.”
― Steven Magee

“Perhaps in a way, then, the kindly old South is responsible for the violent present we have inherited. Since the founding of the republic the South has dictated and defined us. Perhaps the South, more even than the wild wild West, more in fact than any other region, is responsible for who we are as a people and as a nation. Since the very beginning the South has compromised us.”
― Eddy L. Harris, South of Haunted Dreams: A Memoir

“The USA is turning into South Korea, as many people now wear COVID-19 face masks in public.”
― Steven Magee

“I learned that food offers entree to big picture issues. Like race and class, gender and justice. Through the years, when I tried to tackle those matters head-on, I often lost an audience. But at tables piled high with country ham, buttermilk biscuits and redeye gravy, I've marveled as all have leaned in close to eat, to talk, to listen. I've come to believe that time at table offers our best chance for all---for black and white, rich and poor---to acknowledge our past and celebrate our future in a spirit of reconciliation.
-John T. Edge, Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi”
― Garden and Gun, The Southerner's Handbook: A Guide to Living the Good Life

“I still sometimes encounter readers from the South who speak to me of the book's impact on them when it first fell into their hands in an Istanbul shantytown, a Greek port, the slums of Madrid, Damascus or Bombay. In these different places the book had an intimate address. It was no longer a sociological (or even political at the first degree) treatise but, rather, a little book of life stories, a sequence of lived moments â€� such as one finds in a family photo album.

[From the Preface]”
― John Berger, A Seventh Man