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Quote by Eddy L. Harris

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South of Haunted Dreams: A Memoir

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Eddy L. Harris

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“[The Montgomery Bus Boycott] is not a drama with only one actor. More precisely it is the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.”

African AmericansBlacksSegregationAlabamaMontgomeryMontgomery Bus BoycottSeparate But EqualRigt
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“But this discontent was still latent in 1954. At that time both Negroes and whites accepted the well-established patterns of segregation as a matter of fact. Hardly anyone challenged the system. Montgomery was an easy-going town; it could even have been described as a peaceful town. But the peace was achieved at the cost of human servitude.”

RaceTensionAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace RelationsDiscontentAlabamaWhitesMontgomery
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“But there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by oppression. There comes a time when people get tired of being plunged into the abyss of exploitation and nagging injustice. The story of Montgomery is the story of 50,000 such Negroes who were willing to substitute tired feed for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery until the walls of segregation were finally battered by the forces of justice.”

JusticeRacismInjusticeOppressionExploitationAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationAlabamaMontgomery
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“I prayed that our growth would be as strong and determined as the seeds of coconut palms, boldly reaching skyward toward the sun diligently boring deeper into the earth to secure a firm foundation for the beautiful, durable, fruit-bearing trees they would become. For me, Mhonda was the place to continue the growth of the still young but strong roots of my tree planted in Kifungilo. This was my life now, the life I’d prayed for, the life that would provide me with an education and would open doors. I wanted this life very much. I told my wavering spirit to bear with me because, just like the coconut palm, I would sway and bend and bruise, but I would survive. I would have to become the tree in the African saying: ‘The tree that bends with the wind does not break.”

InspirationalFaithGrowthPositive ThinkingDeterminationBraveryAutobiographyChallenging Status Quo
Book:Africa's Child
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“I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color.”

PovertyHungerAlabamaGeorge Wallace
Book:All Over but the Shoutin'
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“I once banged out a story in Peshawar, Pakistan, while eating a chicken salad sandwich, as demonstrators shouted their displeasure of all things American in the glow of burning flags and some steel-edged radials. I was told, by well-meaning people, that I should tell the angry crowds that I was, in fact, Canadian. I just looked at them. How in the world do you pretend to be from Calgary, when you talk like me? I thought briefly, I would say I was from Alabama, and hope they didn’t know exactly where that was, but I am pretty sure that, if I had, someone would answer back: “Roll Tide.”

PakistanAlabamaRoll Tide
Book:My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South
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“Mobile's AfricaTown: Published timelines of African-American history invariably mention that the last slave ship to bring Africans to North America was the *Clotilde* … what they never explain is how this happened 50 years after the United States banned the importation of slaves. The explanation is both trivial and tragic. Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipbuilder, made a wager over a few whiskies that he could elude federal agents… …While descendents of the Clotilde captives still hold reunions in the area, there is little physical evidence of this community’s origins, except for the bust of Cudjoe Lewis… …Lewis (who was originally called ‘Kazoola’) died in 1945, possibly the last surviving slave-ship captive in America.”

MobileAlabamaSlave TradeMiddle PassageSlave ShipAfricatownCudjoe Lewis
Book:Lonely Planet Louisiana & the Deep South
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