Quotes from 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

the difficulty of gaining access to job sites for inspection, and the perennial lack of regulatory law backed by sufficient funding and manpower.

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.

An injunction the city had obtained against a sanitation strike in 1966 was still in effect, and could be wielded against the local.

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

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.

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.

With great prescience he warned of the need to develop common bargaining goals for autoworkers in all auto-producing nations as a means of counteracting global wage competition, and recommended the country turn its attention to repairing bridges, roads, and other infrastructures.

major American agricultural concerns.

working at reduced pay, with marginal perks and nonexistent health coverage.

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.

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.

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.

first year to pass without a single recorded lynching anywhere in the United States was 1952,

the growth of trade unions into mighty business enterprises.

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

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?

a strike in the era of globalization must be vigorously supported by allies near and far and exceptionally well managed.

President Bill Clinton led the country into international trade agreements

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.