Daniel Woodrell Quotes

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.

The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.

We examine and highlight the history of the African descendants in America, and know that each and every one of us has come this far because of our faith in this country.

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.

I don't want to go negative on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he didn't pass an economic deal in the first 100 days. We have passed the largest Recovery Act in the history of the country.

Black history is American history.

History looks very different from a black point of view. The heroes are different, and the eras get different names. The Progressive Era is no longer the Progressive Era, because it's the era in which more black people are lynched than in any other period in American history.

The American government cannot escape its history.

I feel like a survivor from an age that people no longer understand. I want to try to explain what the 1930s - the golden age of Hollywood - was truly like. People forget that America was such a different place then, not yet the dominant force in the world.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.

Boycotts have been a critical part of social justice in American history, particularly for African-Americans.

The fault line in American history is now a dividing line in the election and it's changing the conversation.

Understanding the true causes of the Depression, as well as the real economic record of the United States in the 1930s, is an essential ingredient in anyone's economic and historical education.

We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.

Roosevelt or Ruin

President Bush blames the LA riots on the 60's. Which 60's is he talking about the 1960s or the 1860s when Lincoln freed the slaves?

I never felt the Great Depression firsthand. I learned about it at Harvard.

The time has gone by for colored people to talk of patriotism: ... He used to be proud that his grandfather … fought for liberty in the Revolutionary War. But that time had passed by.

The saloon is as dead as slavery.

Roosevelt’s New Deal would have been impossible without the support of the Southern segregationists.

I ascribe the New Deal as important almost on a par with the French Revolution – not merely an important event in the history of the United States, but the most important event in the history of the United States.

The New Deal ultimately undermined Jim Crow’s prospects. The very legislation embraced by Southern segregationists created at first mere chinks, then whole openings for social change that were grasped by an incipient, soon powerful, movement for equal rights for Blacks.

In approaching this problem [school desegregation], we cannot turn the clock back...

We have reached a crises in the history of this country when no man, however humble his rank or limited his influence, has a right to stand neutral..