When he asked if she was okay, her eyes welled with tears and she said, “Like I’m always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can’t do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.

Rebecca Skloot
About This Quote

The young man in the story said he wanted to go into history, but he had a bad attitude. The fact is that times were different when he was growing up; when he was in school he never heard anybody talk about what to do when things got out of hand. He didn’t know what to do if violence erupted at a demonstration or during a march for civil rights. He didn’t know how to deal with racist cops.

He couldn’t help his brothers who had been jailed or beaten by the police. In short, he didn’t know what to do if things got out of hand. And that is part of the point of his story: knowing what not to do when things get out of hand.

Source: The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

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