Timothy B. Tyson Quotes

#1. We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.

Timothy B. Tyson

#2. That we not become prejudiced against those are prejudiced, or whose prejudices. May no be our own.

Timothy B. Tyson

#3. Most of us would rather claim to have always been perfect that admit how much we have grown.

Timothy B. Tyson

#4. It baffles me that people think that obliterating the past will save them from its consequences, as if throwing away the empty cake plate would help you lose weight.

Timothy B. Tyson

#5. Some things are worse than death... If a man lives, he must still live with himself.

Timothy B. Tyson

#6. What the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don't understand is how deeply the past holds the future in its grip - even, and perhaps especially, when it remains unacknowledged.

Timothy B. Tyson

#7. We want to transcend our history without actually confronting it. We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here.

Timothy B. Tyson

#8. The Lord works through deeply flawed people, since He made so few of the other kind.

Timothy B. Tyson

#9. Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live."5

Timothy B. Tyson

#10. He held his ground like a sweet gum stump trying hard to live in a spirit of love and action, not anger and reaction

Timothy B. Tyson

#11. We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here. Our failure to confront the historical truth about how African Americans finally won their freedom presents a major obstacle to genuine racial reconciliation.

Timothy B. Tyson

#12. The federal government was entirely complicit. When President Roosevelt passed the Social Security Act of 1935, Southern conservatives and their Northern Republican allies forced the New Deal legislation to exclude domestic workers and farmworkers from all of its employment provisions. That shielded

Timothy B. Tyson

#13. If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.

Timothy B. Tyson

#14. In politics, everyone regards themselves as a moderate, because they know some other sumbitch who's twice as crazy as they are.

Timothy B. Tyson

#15. Anyone intent on moral clarity might want to find another book and, in fact, might not want to go anywhere near the enduring chasm of race in the United States.

Timothy B. Tyson

#16. When we said we were going to do something "directly," which is pronounced "dreckly," we meant that we were going to get to it sooner or later, one of these days, maybe never, and please don't ask again.

Timothy B. Tyson

#17. It was like watching a community you thought you knew reveal itself as something else.

Timothy B. Tyson

#18. What others might dismiss as the vagaries of fate, my father interpreted as dancing lessons from the Divine.

Timothy B. Tyson

#19. Tobacco put food on our tables, steeples on our churches, stains on our fingers, spots on our lungs, and contradictions in our hearts.

Timothy B. Tyson

#20. In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus.

Timothy B. Tyson

#21. You read yourself full, you pray yourself hot, and then you turn yourself loose.

Timothy B. Tyson

#22. It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world.

Timothy B. Tyson