Quotes About Injustice

What if these different despised groups—the Indians, the slaves, the poor whites—should combine? Even before there were so many blacks, in the seventeenth century, there was, as Abbot Smith puts it, "a lively fear that servants would join with Negroes or Indians to overcome the small number of masters.

Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old.

When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, "there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines.

Ten thousand people wrote letters to the governor of Utah, protesting the verdict, but Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad. Before he died he wrote to Bill Haywood, another IWW leader, "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize." Socialism

And Bernice Johnson, who organized the Albany Freedom Singers and was expelled from Albany State College for her determined involvement in the movement.

It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. Certainly this was the experience of African-Americans in this country for two hundred years.

Bacon gave his reasons for the rebellion in a paper called "Declaration of the People." It blended the frontiersmen's hatred of the Indians with the common people's anger toward the rich. Bacon accused the Berkeley government of wrongdoing, including unfair taxes and not protecting the western farmers from the Indians.

God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor.

No doubt the odds are against dissenters in any nation's judicial system. But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.

It has spread among skilled workers, white-collar workers, professionals; for the first time in the nation's history, perhaps, both the lower classes and the middle classes, the prisoners and the guards, were disillusioned with the system.

It was a time of intense racism in the United States. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs—hanged, burned, mutilated. The Filipinos were brown-skinned, physically identifiable, strange-speaking and strange-looking to Americans. To the usual indiscriminate brutality of war was thus added the factor of racial hostility.

For a while, the English tried softer tactics. But ultimately, it was back to annihilation. The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million.

We're coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree; We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.

The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however, the Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and poor. For, if some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had the land, the money, the newspapers, the church, the educational system -how could voting, however broad, cut into such power?

In modern times, exploitation is disguised—it is accomplished by law, which has the look of neutrality and fairness.

The United States government had signed more than four hundred treaties with Indians and violated every single one.

From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two classes—paupers and millionaires….

Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews

In January 1943, there appeared in a Negro newspaper this Draftee's Prayer: Dear Lord, today I go to war: To fight, to die, Tell me what for? Dear Lord, I'll fight, I do not fear, Germans or Japs; My fears are here. America!

the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture

quoting a socialist writer in the San Francisco Voice of Labor: It is a terrible thing to think that the poor workers of this country should be sent to kill and wound the poor workers of Spain merely because a few leaders may incite them to do so.

Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may.

grievances of the lowest classes mingled with