Dyson: Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (2006)

• the Deltaic Plain and the Chenier Plain are two wetlands fed by the Mississippi River that are undergoing profound shrinking and deterioration, which makes hurricanes more substantially more dangerous and destructive (p.84)

The perils and possibilities of exile and migration are painfully familiar moments in the collective memory of black America. (p. 116)

Black folk have been a pilgrim people, a wayfaring group, a folk who are rarely ever really at home, unsettled, always uprooted, forever migrating from place to place, exiles in their own country, their movements spurred as much by tragedy as opportunity. (p. 198)

On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that the men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. MLK, Riverside Church, "A Time to Break SIlence" A Testament of Hope, p. 241

Charity is no substitute for justice. (p. 152)

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public. (p. 203)

• Nas, the hiphop guy with his father Olu Dara: a song called Bridging the Gap.

• Wade in the Water: the spiritual that talks about "trouble the waters"

• MLK quoting Amos: "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project