John L. Lewis Quotes
Governor Murphy, when you gave ardent support to the Irish revolutionary movement against the British Empire, you were not doing that because of your high regard for law and order. You did not then say "Uphold the law!" when your father, Governor Murphy, was imprisoned by the British authorities for his activities as an Irish revolutionary. You did not sing forth with hosannas and say, "The law cannot be wrong. The law must be supported. It is right and just that my father be put in prison. Praised be the law!" And when the British government took your grandfather as an Irish revolutionary and hanged him by the neck until he was dead, you did not get down on your knees and burst forth in praise for the sanctity and the glory and the purity of the law, the law that must be upheld at all costs! But here, Governor Murphy, you do. You want my answer, sir? I give it to you. Tomorrow morning I shall personally enter General Motors Plant Chevrolet Number 4. I shall order the men to disregard your order, to stand fast. I shall then walk to the largest window in the plant, open it, divest myself of my outer rainments, remove my shirt and bare my bosom. Then when you order your troops to fire, mine will be the first breast those bullets will strike! And as my body falls from the window to the ground, you listen to the voice of your grandfather as he whispers in your ear.
John L. Lewis, 1882-1947, President, United Mine Workers of America, Challenge to Michigan Governor Murphy who had called out the State Militia to preserve “law and order” and had called upon Lewis and his strikers to clear the area in the name of the law, Saul Alinsky, John L. Lewis, An Unauthorized Biography
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The second statement was made after he had been arrested and was in jail.
Chavez had been fasting in protest and was too weak to speak when Kennedy visited.
John Llewellyn Lewis was an American leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) from 1920 to 1960. A major player in the history of coal mining, he was the driving force behind the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which established the United Steel Workers of America and helped organize millions of other industrial workers in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. After resigning as head of the CIO in 1941, Lewis took the United Mine Workers out of the CIO in 1942 and in 1944 took the union into the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
