Faith & Spirit Quote by Mordecai Wyatt Johnson

Johnson’s “bread” metaphor is doing more than adding biblical warmth; it’s a moral accounting system. Repression and violence are framed as a counterfeit diet that once sustained a certain kind of “faith” - not spiritual devotion in the abstract, but civic hope disciplined into silence. By saying that faith has “fed” on repression, he exposes a grim American habit: we praise patience in the oppressed as if endurance were nourishment, then call that patience “order.”

The turn is in “now.” Johnson marks a threshold moment when survival strategies stop working, when loyalty to democratic ideals can’t be maintained on empty calories. The demand isn’t for a vague freedom; it’s “public equality” and “public responsibility,” a pairing that refuses the usual escape hatch of private tolerance. Equality has to be visible, institutional, enforced in shared space. Responsibility is aimed at both citizens and the state: liberty is not just permission; it’s an obligation to build structures where rights are real.

“It must not be denied them” lands like a verdict. The pronoun “them” indicts the audience - likely comfortable, powerful, tempted to treat civil rights as a request to be granted rather than a debt owed. As an educator, Johnson speaks like someone accustomed to explaining first principles, but the subtext is impatience with remedial civics. This is integration-era rhetoric (and Johnson was a major Black university president and civil rights leader) that insists the nation’s democratic narrative has reached a test point: keep rationing justice, and the story collapses under its own hypocrisy.