Philip Dray > Quotes

“Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation’s history?”
― Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

“I tried to balance the sufferings of the miserable victim against the moral degradation of Memphis, and the truth flashed over me that in large measure the race question involves the saving of black America’s body and white America’s soul.”
― Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

“in the case of the Coxey industrials, they appeared to want something they had not earned. Their demands implied that poverty and unemployment did not stem from laziness or even bad luck, but rather from larger, systemic problems in the economy, in society—factors that were beyond any one person’s control.59 Such a claim raised vexing questions. Self-reliance, resourcefulness, individual initiative—these traits were intrinsic to the ideal of what it meant to be American. Americans always made do. If government took greater responsibility for people’s well-being, would that not alter the very essence of the United States, seduce and possibly corrupt its character? Was that not the aim of those foreign theories spread in workers’ enclaves in the big cities—anarchism, Communism, Socialism?”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“Work stoppages in America declined from 3,111 in 1977 to only 385 by 1995, even as real wages lost 15 percent of their value—data that, as if on a diagnostic chart, revealed an ailing U.S. labor movement.96”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“The AIFLD’s fingerprints were later found on a number of U.S. covert incursions in Latin America—including the toppling in 1954 of the labor-supported Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reforms were opposed by the United Fruit Company, the CIA, and the AFL-CIO.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“working at reduced pay, with marginal perks and nonexistent health coverage.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“the difficulty of gaining access to job sites for inspection, and the perennial lack of regulatory law backed by sufficient funding and manpower.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“first year to pass without a single recorded lynching anywhere in the United States was 1952,”
― Philip Dray, A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age

“The incorrigibles . . . still indulge in the swagger which was so customary before and during the war, and still hope for a time when the Southern confederacy will achieve its independence. This class consists mostly of young men, and comprise the loiterers of the towns and the idlers of the country.”
― Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

“President Bill Clinton led the country into international trade agreements”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“An injunction the city had obtained against a sanitation strike in 1966 was still in effect, and could be wielded against the local.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“Senator Edward Kennedy accused the Republicans of trying to “dismantle our federal government and all it stands for,”74 and laid into Reagan for pursuing “the discredited and disastrous ideas of the 1920s,”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“Douglass, who often drew comparisons between Jews and blacks, noted that the “Jew is hated in Russia because he is thrifty,” while in America the “Negro meets no resistance when on a downward course. It is only when he rises in wealth, intelligence and manly character that he brings upon himself the heavy hand of persecution.”
― Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

“The torture of the victim lasted almost half an hour. It began when a man stepped forward and very matter-of-factly sliced off Hose’s ears. Then several men grabbed Hose’s arms and held them forward so his fingers could be severed one by one and shown to the crowd. Finally, a blade was passed between his thighs, Hose cried in agony, and a moment later his genitals were held aloft.”
― Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

“major American agricultural concerns.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“The statement that a man or company of men who put their money in a business have a right to operate it as they see fit, without regard to the public interest, belongs to days long since passed away,” the congressional report asserted. “Every individual who invests his capital … is entitled to the protection of the law … but he owes something to society.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“Taft-Hartley had excluded foremen and supervisors from labor-law coverage, which made workplace unity more difficult because fewer new jobs were blue-collar in character and more positions in the emerging service fields were designated as supervisory, meaning”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“In one inadvertently revealing action, the Rockefeller forces formally announced that CFI was now prepared to concede certain improvements to the Colorado miners, only to learn that many of these “privileges” were already the law in Colorado, that they had long been stifled by the company, and that their denial had been among the strikers’ major grievances.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“condemning a war that, due to college draft deferments, was being fought largely by soldiers drawn from the working class, with blacks a proportionately high percentage.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“He did not believe the AFL-CIO was up to these challenges. “As the parent body of the American labor movement, [it] suffers from a sense of complacency and adherence to the status quo, and is not fulfilling the basic aims and purposes which prompted the merger of the AFL and CIO” in the first place, Reuther remarked in December 1967.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“The Civil War ceased physically in 1865,” noted Thomas Beer, a chronicler of the Mauve Decade, which closed out the century, “and its political end may be reasonably expected about the year 3000.”
― Philip Dray, A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age

“I can think of no threat more evil for our democracy . . . [than] the spirit of independence gone drunk,” wrote Thomas Jefferson.”
― Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

“Looming over all such changes was globalization—the dispersal of the world’s trade and finances through advances in shipping, air freight, telecommunications, and computerized banking and money exchanges, which allowed U.S. businesses access to lower-cost workers and production overseas—a trend that accelerated when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, bringing down the iron curtain and opening new markets as well as cheap labor to global producers. This”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“[B]y far the majority of Negro murders are never recorded, never known except to the perpetrators and the bereaved survivors of the victim. Negro men and women leave their homes and are never seen alive again.…This is a well-known pattern of American culture.… Mass murder on the basis of race is a powerful source of constant terror, as it is intended to be, to the whole Negro people. As a result of the pattern of extra-legal violence in which they live out their lives, if they do live, the entire Negro people exists in a constant fear that cannot fail to cause serious bodily and mental harm.… Perennial, hour by hour, moment by moment lynching of the Negro’s soul in countless psychological, in myriad physical forms, that is the greatest and most enduring lynching of all. This is written into the spiritual hanging of all those millions, it is carved into their daily thinking, woven into their total living experience. They are lynched in the thousands of glances from white supremacists all over the land every day.”
― Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

“To what extent would antiwar opinions endanger its alliance with the Democratic Party? Had the movement’s hesitation on the subject already rendered it toothless as a credible force for social change?”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“For labor, it meant a new openness to the idea that workers and capital might acknowledge the other’s necessity, that trade unions had a role to play in standardizing decent wages so as to alleviate the need for relief or charity, and that some form of mutualism, the working out of problems, could replace the cyclical tradition of hurtful strikes and class antagonism. In this evolving process government would be asked whether, if it was to be involved in labor disputes, it might find more constructive methods than urging court injunctions and dispatching regiments.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“a strike in the era of globalization must be vigorously supported by allies near and far and exceptionally well managed.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“It had linked its fate to the activism of a political party that was far from activist, that largely took labor’s support for granted; there seemed little real pressure on the Democrats to deliver for labor when it knew, everyone knew, that labor had nowhere else to go.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“The students targeted not only college retailers and administrators but also picketed major college sporting events.”
― Philip Dray, There is Power in a Union

“a ban on a Coney Island attraction known as “Negro Ball Dodging,” in which whites hurled baseballs at Black men’s heads as they appeared in the openings of a cloth or wooden facade.”
― Philip Dray, A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age