7 Quotes by Robert Jones Jr.

The most important thing now, his father told him: Grow. Gather. Keep. Because then, in the echoing halls, and even in future whispers, they will build monuments in your honor and you will be remembered not for your failures—not for your stumbles or your transgressions or your kills—but for only your greatest triumphs.

Yet, do not imagine that royal blood is of any significant import.It is not.Often, it is the most impure, arriving at its own creation through vanity and more than a little cruelty.You are of the common folk. By common we mean dancing, singing, weaving, speaking: the ones who could have held their heads high but chose to hold their hands high instead. For they knew that all the universe wanted was their reverence, not their pride.

Isaiah smiled at Samuel's unwillingness, his grunts and sighs and head shaking, even though he understood the danger in it. Tiny resistances were a kind of healing in a weeping place.

It seems that wherever the Black body is present, whether in solitary or a multitude, whites feel threatened, perhaps by the ghosts of their own sins for which they have never atoned.

Every travesty that had ever been committed had been committed by plain people.

Our responsibility is to tell you the truth. But since you were never told the truth, you will believe it a lie. Lies are more affectionate than truth and embrace with both arms.

They expected the crowd that had already gathered, golden in the torchlight of dawn. Some were tired. Some were smiling. The latter stunned Isaiah, but not Samuel. These were people after all. There was, therefore, some kind of happiness to be found in someone else being humiliated for once. Failure of memory prevented the empathy that should have been natural. Samuel knew, though, that it was selective memory, the kind that was cultivated here among the forget-me-nots.