Kim Kelly (journalist) Quotes (2022-)

“In 1905, when she was invited to appear at the founding convention of a new radical industrial union christened the Industrial Workers of the World, Lucy Parsons thought she'd found her niche once again. Unfortunately, she realized that the other founders saw her as more of a mascot than a comrade.”

“The Green New Deal, a proposal introduced by Democratic lawmakers Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey and galvanized by an engaged youth movement, is perhaps the U.S. government's most robust attempt to make a dent in the country's outsized carbon emissions and end its reliance on fossil fuels, both of which propel the ongoing climate disaster when in use (burning them releases harmful chemicals into the atmosphere) and during extraction (via methods like oil drilling and coal mining, which cause irreparable damage to the environment). The Green New Deal also seeks to address the dire income inequality that has existed since European colonizers stepped foot on this native land, and has only been exacerbated by climate change, both here and on global terms. This policy proposal isn't a fix-all, but it is an ambitious program that, if implemented, has the potential to enact real, much-needed change, especially if other entities (for example, New York City, whose city council recently passed a Climate Mobilization Act) are inspired to take action on a local level.”

“In Flynn's words, it was "a day without parallel in American labor history... a reign of terror prevailed in Lawrence which literally shook America."”

“"It was a Declaration of Economic Independence, and the first united blow for economic liberty struck by the Negroes of the South!" Wells later wrote of the landowners' reaction to Black sharecroppers' efforts to unionize and bargain for higher prices. "That was their crime and it had to be avenged." Her masterful report on her findings in Elaine, The Arkansas Race Riot, helped cement the massacre and its legacy in the public consciousness, but the work of properly commemorating the Elaine Twelve themselves continues to this day.”

“The nineteenth century allowed little room for women of color to find their voices-let alone share them with the masses-and the few who did manage to break their silence often became figures of mixed curiosity and revulsion. There are few greater examples of that than Lucy Parsons...Her enthralling demeanor, sophisticated oratory skills, and blistering anti-capitalist rhetoric also made her a star to live crowds, defying the nineteenth-century social convention against women addressing mixed crowds...Her impassioned entreaties on behalf of suffering laborers earned her both awe and scorn from the press, which would call her a "red-mouthed anarchist" in one line and then breathlessly wax on about her beauty and fashionable dresses in the next.”

“Dr. King was a union man, and the Amazon workers of Bessemer saw themselves as following in his footsteps on the long road toward justice.”

“Every worker today stands on the shoulders of giants, people like Lucy Parsons, Cesar Chavez, Bayard Rustin, Eugene V. Debs, and Walter Reuther.”

“As President Nixon repeatedly shot down the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, DIA mobilized, and eighty activists shut down Madison Avenue to protest his veto.”

“Every worker today stands on the shoulders of giants, people you will meet here like Lucy Parsons, Cesar Chavez, Bayard Rustin, Eugene V. Debs, and Walter Reuther.”

“As Frederick Douglass observed in his autobiography, under this system of modified serfdom, the Black sharecropper was "free from the individual master," but was now "the slave of society."”

“Luisa Moreno spent her storied career advocating for Latino workers' rights, organizing thousands of Louisiana sugarcane workers, Texas pecan shellers, Colorado sugarbeet workers, and a multiethnic union of thirteen thousand cigar makers in Florida.”

“In 1961, civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, a disabled Black woman, was forcibly sterilized without her knowledge; the procedure was so common at the time that it had its own nickname, the "Mississippi appendectomy." Buck v. Bell has never been overturned.”

“the corrupt mismanagement of UMWA president Tony Boyle had tanked the UMWA-controlled Welfare and Retirement Fund, which previous UMWA president John L. Lewis had implemented in the 1950s to provide for workers who had given their bodies (and often, their lives) to the mines.”

“Dorothy Lee Bolden's emphasis on voting rights and equality was also heard loud and clear by another generation of community-minded Black leaders like voting rights activist and politician Stacey Abrams, whose 2018 gubernatorial campaign was strongly supported in Atlanta by the National Domestic Workers Alliance.”

“During his short life, he penned some of the Wobblies' most beloved labor songs, including labor movement mainstays like "There Is Power in a Union" and "Rebel Girl," which he dedicated to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and his last words to Big Bill Haywood have since been taken up as a rallying cry-"Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize!"”

“The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and President Johnson's 1967 Executive Order 11375, which strengthened enforcement of the policy barring hiring discrimination on the basis of sex, removed the last major legal hurdles for women who wanted to work in the mines.”

“Opposing unions-public sector and otherwise-has since become utterly entrenched in the Republican Party's policies and public image, even as it continues to attempt to paint itself as representing "hardworking blue-collar men and women," as Texas senator Ted Cruz (himself a millionaire married to an heiress) phrased it in one especially disingenuous 2021 tweet.”

“A Ukrainian immigrant and lifelong radical, Lemlich had moved to New York City in 1903 and led her coworkers at various factories out on strikes between 1906 and 1909. She, like Rose Schneiderman and many others of her time, was one of the early U.S. labor movement's revolutionary "fiery Jewish girls" who would soon leave a mark in their new homeland's history books.”

“Before embarking on his illustrious career as an educator and activist, Booker T. Washington, the son of enslaved parents, spent part of his childhood working in the salt furnaces of the Kanawha Salines. "Though I was a mere child, my stepfather put me and my brother at work in one of the furnaces," he explained in his autobiography. "Often I began work as early as four o'clock in the morning." At the time, Washington was nine years old.”

“Communist Mexican-American labor activist Emma Tenayuca, "the Passionflower of Texas," led protests, walkouts, and demonstrations to protest the deplorable working and living conditions that Latino workers faced in her native San Antonio...Like many labor activists of her generation, Tenayuca was later blacklisted for her political affiliations, but there was no erasing the impact she'd made on San Antonio and the labor movement as a whole.”

“During the 1930s, President Herbert Hoover enacted a massive deportation raid on people of Mexican descent, in which up to 1.8 million Latinos-nearly 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens-were forcibly removed to Mexico. (President Eisenhower would reprise this racist campaign in 1954, when more than 1 million more Latino people were violently rounded up and deported.) As all this state-sponsored chaos played out, the AFL-CIO finally began to warm up to the idea of organizing Latino workers again.”

“Malcolm X spent time on the railroads as a youth selling sandwiches and washing dishes, but lasted only about a day with Pullman. He undoubtedly found Pullman's well-padded rule book and demand for obsequious service intolerable. But while he was there, the revolutionary observed, "We were in that world of Negroes who were both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained."”

“Kim Kelly vibrantly brings struggles and sacrifices of badass working-classs heroes to life and we need to hear these voices now more than ever”

“From the moment I read Kim's work the first time, I knew Mother Jones would have loved her...By the time Kim made waves in the labor movement with her piece "Everything You Need to Know about General Strikes," I was hooked...She has a writer's intellectual curiosity and a reporter's nose for the truth, and it shows in this book...While there are many who wish we would forget, Kim's thrilling and incisive look at our history reminds us of a fundamental truth: the labor movement belongs to all of us.”