“ All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy. ”
He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.
~ John Howard Griffin
The author meets an African-American who observes that his fellows who begin with aspirations to a good education, solid career, and the raising of a family slowly lose that incentive. Even those who have a college education, he observes, need to take menial jobs and begin to look for excitement in less productive places.
The author explains that some find recourse from injustice in literature and art but that these tend to deepen sensitivity to injustice rather than dull it.
Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: What in God's name are you doing to yourself?
