Home > Author > Timothy B. Tyson
1 " If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth. "
― Timothy B. Tyson , Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
2 " The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened. "
3 " The Lord works through deeply flawed people, since He made so few of the other kind. "
4 " It was like watching a community you thought you knew reveal itself as something else. "
― Timothy B. Tyson , The Blood of Emmett Till
5 " In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus. "
6 " Unjust social orders do no fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor, though such appeals may be an important element; history teaches us that they fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down. Rarely do such revolutions emerge in a neat and morally pristine process. "
7 " 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. "
8 " In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt. "
9 " Some things are worse than death... If a man lives, he must still live with himself. "
10 " Every minister worthy of the name has to walk the line between prophetic vision and spiritual sustenance, between telling people the comforting things they want to hear and challenging them with the difficult things they need to hear. In Oxford, Daddy began to feel as though all the members wanted him to do was to marry them and bury them and stay away from their souls. "
11 " 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. "
12 " 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. "
13 " Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.”5 "
14 " Oxford was as drenched in Dixie as we were, just about as Southern a town as you would ever hope to find, which generally was a good thing, because that meant that the weather was nice, except when it was hot enough to fry pork chops on the pavement, and the food was delicious, though it would thicken the walls of your arteries and kill you deader than Stonewall Jackson, and the people were big hearted and friendly, though it was not the hardest place in the world to get murdered for having bad manners. Even our main crop could kill you. "
15 " 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. "
16 " Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive and probably won’t. "
17 " 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. "
18 " Tobacco put food on our tables, steeples on our churches, stains on our fingers, spots on our lungs, and contradictions in our hearts. "
19 " Racism was an important moral issue, one that the church needed to confront. Putting a black man in a position of honor and authority was a good thing, and if there was controversy over it, that was not a bad thing thing, either. People needed to work through these things, and not just in the abstract. "
20 " We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them. "
