“This development signified also that jazz would someday have to contend with the idea of its being an art (since that was the white man's only way into it). The emergence of the white player meant that Afro-American culture had already become the expression of a particular kind of American experience, and what is most important, that this experience was available intellectually, that it could be learned.”

“Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering.”

“The miscegnation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.”

“Reading American photographs is also a way of reading the past-not just the scenes recorded and the faces immobilized into permanent images, but the past as culture, as ways of thinking and feeling, as experience”

“Rachel? my dad prompts.Do I have to...?"His stern expression answers my questionFine. I'm grateful that the Native Americans are finally getting revenge on the white man for destroying their culture, by building megacasinos.”

“The most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage.”