Juneteenth Quotes

“God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.”

“Words of Emancipation didn’t arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.”

“He’s holding on even though Death is around somewhere close by- as he always is. I’ll just have to try once more to outwait him, to outface him, even though I’ve seen enough even for an old preacher like me...”

“Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down superfine, but it doesn’t just blow away.”

“It’s the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us.”

“If we’d been the kind to depend on the sword instead of the Lord, we’d been in our graves long ago.”

“Meaning grows with the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.”

“So let us pray, not for him but for overselves and for all those whose job it is to wear those great big shoes he left this nation to fill...”

“Give a man wood, and he will learn-to make fire. Give him new land and he will learn to live My way.”

“Not back to that me, not to that six-seven year old ventriloquist’s dummy dressed in a white evening suit. Not to that charlatan born-must I have no charity for me?

“Politics is an art of maneuvering, and to move them you must change home base.”

“You know that we were born of sacrifice, and that we have had to live by a different truth and that that truth is good and the vision of manhood it stands for is more human, more desirable, more real.”

″... on this great day of deliverance, on this day of emancipation, let’s us tell ourselves our story...”