Word: kindness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...engaged to defend a 19-year-old Communist named Angelo Herndon, who had been arrested for leading an unemployment demonstration. "This case," said Davis, "was the turning point of my whole life. In the course of trying it, I was made the victim with my client of the worst kind of treatment against Negroes. The judge referred to me and my client as 'nigger' and 'darky'* and threatened many times to jail...
...they made sense to me. As I read them I thought of them in terms of my father and the Ku Klux Klan crosses burned in his front yard when he became a member of the Republican National Committee, and of my mother, who died early because of that kind of thing...
...perhaps," shouted Connally. "Career men are all right in their places, but . . . they get into ruts . . . The career man says, 'I have to go. We have tea at 4 o'clock. I am sorry, but I must go to tea.' They nearly all wear the same kind of clothes . . . Their minds have little grooves in them...
Having waved aside the prospect of immortality, Writer Mencken laid about him with such relish that it finally settled into a kind of smugness. His iconoclasm became a trademark and an act; the Paris-green-covered American Mercury that he edited became an undergraduate bible for the bright boys of the '20s and early '30s. He scorned marriage ("Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't they'd be married, too"). But he shook the faith of many an admirer when he married at 50 and said: "I have often imagined that...
Mencken has been a prodigious workman with a fine regard for the craft of writing. Even the "professors" he loved to pummel had to cheer his massive, scholarly and readable American Language as the best thing of its kind. At another extreme, his autobiographical books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days) are among the most engaging of any in U.S. writing. During the past decade his writings and utterances have tended toward peevish and irresponsible flailings of men and politics. But he has seldom hit below the belt and has never used the stab in the back. Whatever his justifications...