Sam Phillips Quotes

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

I was raised by my grandmother on a farm, where we were really poor - we had dirt floors - but so did everybody else.

My grandmother was a sharecropper. That wasn't even that long ago! My grandma was a sharecropper.

I grew up in a small segregated steel town 6o miles outside of Cleveland, my parents grew up in the segregated south. As a family we struggled financially, and I grew up in the '60s and '70s where overt racism ruled the day.

We lived in a farm village, and no one could afford to buy a car or to fly. We were envious. We couldn't afford any toys. I couldn't imagine making a real car.

He thinks with regret of the great days when he could at harvest time at least go down into Hungary and work on the big estates and bring back, as his wage, a side of bacon for the winter. That was wealth, to him.

We were sharecroppers - we were a little bit of everything. We farmed and tried to make something.

And we never got the mule, let alone the forty acres.

I was a Depression kid, growing up in Oklahoma.

My mother and father and many of my relatives had been sharecroppers.

We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.

I grew up very poor in rural Alabama.

My grandmom worked as a maid for most of her life, and she worked in the tobacco and the cotton fields, whatever she could get.

North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.

I grew up in Northern Ireland, in the middle of nowhere, and when you are poor, you are really poor. And when you are rich, you are very rich. This is not a new phenomenon.

My father was a cotton farmer first and - but he didn't have any land or what land he had, he lost it in the Depression. So he worked as a woodman and cut pulpwood for the paper mills, rode the rails in boxcars going from one harvest to another to try to make a little money picking fruit or vegetables.

Appalachia, my state, eastern Kentucky, has a large amount of poverty.

My grandfather on my paternal side, Richard Frazier, was born in the late 1850s and, therefore, was born into slavery but was a sharecropper in South Carolina for his entire life.

I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it's wrong to force poor people to live that way.

I was born in South Carolina. On my dad's farm, I didn't have much. I'm just a poor kid who worked in a produce market.

I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family.

I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course. I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yards. We butchered every year. I'll never forget those things.

Time begins the healing process of wounds cut deeply by oppression. We soothe ourselves with the salve of attempted indifference, accepting the false pattern set up by the horrible restriction of Jim Crow laws.

I loved my mom so much because she had to work on a penny just to put food on the table... During the Depression in the United States, everybody had a tough time. And I was so hurt because she was crying that she didn't have any food for us for Thanksgiving.

I grew up in New York City during the Depression. My earliest recollections were of my parents talking about what they would do if they didn't have the rent money. Luckily, we were never evicted. But my father was unemployed most of the time.