August Wilson Quotes

Mahalia Jackson, I grew up around the corner from in Chicago.

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, 'Look how far we've come,' because we hadn't come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson's population was half white and half black, I didn't have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school.

It was not possible to broadcast any of that because of an agreement between Jackson and the family. Our legal advice was that we could not broadcast it.

I was an 18-year-old kid, and I was in the heart of things in Washington. My interest in American politics and, particularly, the Kennedys, began then.

You know, people'd always ask 'Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?' They never seen the house I'm running from.

Students in the '60s were responsible for great changes, politically and socially.

I find Jesse Jackson to be religiously, progressively old fashioned.

I thought I had the rights to The Lord of the Rings. I don't know how Jackson ended up with the rights.

If Barack Obama now, or some black person in the future, should become president, neither Jesse Jackson nor Al Sharpton would be out of a job. A black president can't end black misery; a black president can't be a civil rights leader or primarily a crusader for racial justice.

It's easy to forget history or give it a cliff notes. The cliff notes of history. But mainly, so much of what happens in 'Eyes on the Prize' happened in Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson, Mississippi isn't really known for any other touchstone to the movement, other than Medgar Evers being killed. There were sit-ins and riots and atrocities.

The great thing that I appreciate - the fact that my godfather, William 'Sticky' Jackson, was a Tuskegee Airman because my father was first born in Ozark, Alabama. The sacrifices and the commitment of those men made it possible for myself and many others.

The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

I don't understand why black people have been so quiescent, so passive over the hundreds of years of American history. Why hasn't there been more violence, more armed struggle? I know answers to some of that, but it seems to me it's an issue of faith, an abiding faith in some sort of great beyond, or great spirit, or even in the American dream.

He was murdered by every member of the gospel who has remained silent about racial discrimination—who has hidden behind the stained glass windows of his church.. He was murdered by every Negro who accepted segregation.

Mr. President, the Black masses are restless and we are going to march on Washington.

[Referring to Jesse Jackson:] ... one of that machismo group.

Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson [Mississippi] he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

Unless we get white people into the streets with Negroes for the march [on Washington], the fight will appear to be between white people and black and not between justice and injustice.

The student protests of the 1960s were partly the outcome of the hypertrophy of the university and the resulting shortcoming in higher education.

He can't run nothing but his mouth.

I learned a lot about evasiveness, and how racists could use a system to forestall equality. I also learned a lot riding those dusty roads and walking into those sullen hostile courts in Jackson, Mississippi. It just seems that unless something's pushed, unless you litigate, nothing happens.

Within 90 days from the time Lincoln that is inaugurated, the Republican Party will be utterly ruined and destroyed. His path is environed with so many difficulties, that even if he had the ability of Jefferson and the energy of Jackson, he would fail, but he is a weak and inexperienced man, and his administration will be doomed from the commencement. If he takes that radical section of the Republican Party, the conservative wing of it will cut loose and repudiate him. If, on the other hand, he courts the conservatives and pursues a moderate conciliatory policy, the radicals will make open war upon his administration.

I may be going to Heaven or Hell, but I'll be going from Jackson.

Coming of age in the 1960s, I heard the word 'fascist' all the time. College presidents were fascists; Vietnam War supporters were fascists. Policemen who tangled with protesters were fascists - on and on.

I grew up in the 1970s, and my friends and I felt very keenly that we had missed the '60s. We were bummed out about it.