Philip Dray

“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

“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