David Levering Lewis Quotes

#1. The commitment to literacy was constant on the part of African Americans. And the percentages of literacy by the end of the century, by 1900, basic literacy has galloped ahead. People believed that education, of course, was the turnstile for advancement.

David Levering Lewis

#2. The business of return migration is a phenomenon that historians have indeed begun to look at, but it is rather an ignored and underplayed story and one that we need to know more about.

David Levering Lewis

#3. In 1900, as the immigrants come down the gangplank into Jersey City, they expect the streets to be paved with gold, and they were only paved with gold in Frank Baum's 'The Wizard of Oz,' of course.

David Levering Lewis

#4. A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.

David Levering Lewis

#5. Harlem was the main chance for the east end of New York, for eastsiders, as that real estate boom that took place in the 1890s - and it was a preposterous one where people bought and sold, and everything appreciated with each sale - and eventually, of course, the house of cards would crumble.

David Levering Lewis

#6. Harlem was an exciting place in the '50s. There were nightclubs that, as a student of Columbia, you dashed off to. The community seemed very viable still.

David Levering Lewis

#7. Eric Walrond, handsome, cosmopolitan, and beguilingly enigmatic, may have been the most promising literary talent of the Harlem Renaissance ... James Davis's finely written, beautifully paced Eric Walrond is a major biography of a fascinating figure.

David Levering Lewis

#8. Government doesn't do much for the new Americans. The assumption is that they'll take care of themselves if they work hard enough.

David Levering Lewis

#9. 1900 was a bit of mixed bag, it seems to me, on the one hand, because this is the year when this country becomes the premiere producer of manufactured goods. Clearly, a lot of people were making a lot of money, but it's also a time that reflects the savaging of one of the deepest depressions.

David Levering Lewis

#10. Philosophically, Dubois may have had no problem with a great African American institution. On the other hand, he always believed ultimately in the co-mingling of groups and the interplay of talents and in the collaboration of groups.

David Levering Lewis

#11. It was clear to many American working men and women that the Homestead Steel Strike of the early 1890s, when Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick broke the backs of the steel workers, that that was a watershed.

David Levering Lewis

#12. I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory.

David Levering Lewis

#13. After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag - the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition.

David Levering Lewis

#14. I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing. I fell into a U.S. history major by chance late in my second year at Fisk University.

David Levering Lewis

#15. Let This Voice Be Heard fulfills the mandate of biography at its best because Maurice Jackson has captured the history of a great moral movement's origins in a single, extraordinary life. An indispensable addition to the antislavery bibliography.

David Levering Lewis

#16. I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.

David Levering Lewis