BUMPING+BACK

[[image:Birmingham_1.jpg align="left"]]
** BUMPING BACK: fighting for social justice **

**What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore - And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over - like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?** -Langston Hughes

= = = “In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing.”       = = = = “the burden [of the “Negro problem”] belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.”   = -**Frederick Douglass, "The Souls of Black Folk"**  “No Negroes in my environment had ever thought of organizing, no matter in how orderly a fashion, and petitioning their white employers for higher wages. The very thought would have been terrifying to them, and they knew that the whites would have retaliated with swift brutality. So, pretending to conform to the laws of the whites, grinning, bowing, they let their fingers stick to what they could touch. And the whites seemed to like it. But I, who stole nothing who wanted to look them straight in the face, who wanted to talk and act like a man, inspi red fear in them. The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged irresponsibility; and their rewards were == bestowed upon us blacks in the degree that we could make them feel safe and superior.”  p.199-200 in Richard Wright’s // Black Boy //

=“Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.” -Lyndon B. Johnson=

   [|Obama Race Speech]

"We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." -Tom Hayden, "Port Huron Statement," p. 45

**“It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear and you make them recognize you.” –From Ralph Ellison’s //Invisible Man//**

 “… he would get glimpses of the Beef Trust from all sorts of aspects, and he would find it everywhere the same; it was the incarnation of blind and insensate Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs, it was the Great Butcher – it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh. Upon the ocean of commerce it sailed as a pirate ship; it had hoisted the black flag and declared war upon civilization.” -Upton Sinclair's //The Jungle//, p. 337-338





"//The more fellas he can get, an' the hungrier, less he's gonna pay. An' he'll get a fella with kids if he can...//" from John Steinbeck's //The Grapes of Wrath//, p. 190

"in the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage," from John Steinbeck's //The Grapes of Wrath//, p.349

=== “<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive">//Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other's welfare, social justice can never be attained.// ” – Helen Keller ===

“…the same state of society which constantly prompts desires, restrains these desires within necessary limits: it gives men more liberty of changing and less interest in change.” –From Alexis de Tocqueville’s //Democracy in America//

[|Newark Race Riots] media type="file" key="01 For What It's Worth.m4a"  Buffalo Springfield- "For What It's Worth" media type="file" key="13 Universal Soldier.m4a" Donovan- "Universal Solider"

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.” –Henry David Thoreau’s //On the Duty of Civil Disobedience//

The American, The Individual?

Bumping Back Reflection