Michael Dyson Quotes
You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr., and not think of death. You might hear the words 'I have a dream,' but they will doubtlessly only serve to underscore an image of a simple motel balcony, a large man made small, a pool of blood. For as famous as he may have been in life, it is - and was - death that ultimately defined him.
Dyson, Michael Eric. April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How it Changed America. Basic Civitas Books, 2008, p. 3.
In 2013, Congress awarded its highest honor to the 4 young Black girls who were murdered in Birmingham, Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights Movement by the KKK who set off a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church. She was sister of Addie Mae Collins, one of the murdered girls, who herself was blinded in one eye and scarred badly in the bombing, refused the medal on behalf of her dead sister. She resented the fact that it had taken all these years for Congress to make this gesture and then would not do anything that might cost money such as monetary restitution. When the Muslim terrorists murdered people in the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks she and her husband observed, Congress swiftly arranged for restitution payments to go to the relatives of the murdered victims and to those wounded. However to her and many other people, when white terrorists murder black victims no monetary restitution many comes forth—only a medal. Although she cleaned houses for a living, she has had to pay medical costs out of her own pocket—she had no insurance then and could not get it until Obamacare as it was a “previous condition”. She has never even been reimbursed for those out of picked medical costs caused by white terrorists whose motives many racists still approve of.
Michael Eric Dyson is an American academic, author, and radio host. He is a professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a Princeton Ph.D. and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two", Dyson has authored or edited 18 books dealing with subjects such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marvin Gaye, Nas's debut album Illmatic, Bill Cosby, Tupac Shakur and Hurricane Katrina.
