May 2012
135 posts
“When we started organizing the farm workers, people would say, how are you going to organize the workers? They don’t speak English. They’re not citizens. They don’t have any money. But we would say to the workers, you have power. And they would say, what kind of power do we have? It’s in your person. You, together with other workers, you can make the difference.”
—Still an activist at 82, Dolores Huerta
“I’m not interested in your girlfriends and your grandmother. You don’t know anything. Write about something you have never, ever thought about before.”
—Toni Morrison on ‘writing about what you know’
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Some Doc Watson hits for your listening pleasures. We’ll have more on the folk and bluegrass legend on tonight’s NewsHour.
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“I withheld color from all the book. Everything is either black or white or not mentioned, until he gets home, and then those cotton fields are pink before they turn, and then the trees. And he even says, were the trees always this deep green? So, all the palette is pushed toward the end. So the reader feels that comfort and safety of home.”
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Toni Morrison on her latest novel “Home,” which chronicles the story of soldier Frank Money, who returns home after his service in the Korean War only to be greeted with both the institutional and casual realities of daily prejudice.
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“Within moments of arriving, we were beckoned out by some soldiers. We thought we were under arrest. It was a confused picture. Then a firefight ensued. So, we took cover in a building, and I discovered that close to where we had taken cover, there was a blanket on the ground.
I pulled the blanket off. And it revealed a man way past fighting age, I would say at least 75, 80 years old, who had been shot in the head, gunshot wound to the head, which — I’m not a pathologist, but it looked like the reason of death for him.
I reached for a blanket, giving him whatever dignity I could in that situation, and went into the next room essentially to escape the gunfire. And there, there was the body of — another blanket was laid out on the floor. Under that, I found the body of a little girl probably 5 or 6 years old, no more than that. And she had a gunshot wound in her chest.
This is only a small part of what has happened in Houla. And these bodies will not yet have been discovered by the United Nations.”
