Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

What did the workers and peasants gain when power passed from the kings and nobles to the bankers and manufacturers?

Every thoughtful and kind-hearted person must regard with interest any device or plan which promises to enable at least the more intelligent, enterprising, and determined part of those who are not capitalists to cease to labor for hire.

In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.

Obama was elected in a flourish of promise that many in the African-American community believed would help not only to symbolize African-American progress since the Civil War and Civil Rights Acts but that his presidency would result in doors opening in the halls of power as had never been seen before by black America.

Americans are right to believe the American Dream is fading. But that dream only became a possibility for white men as a result of the labor struggles and reforms of the New Deal, and it began to extend to minorities and women only after the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Thomas Sowell, among many others, has articulated the power of individual responsibility as an antidote to black poverty for over 40 years. Black thinkers as far back as Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington have done the same.

We forgot that Martin Luther King, Jr. changed his discourse toward the end of his life because he understood that the real fundamental problem of this country was not just race, it was class. It was the economical situation of not only poor blacks but also the poor white part of the population and everything in between.

We can make black lives matter in the labor movement by building the kinds of movements that black women need to shape a new economy and a new democracy that don't force them to choose between making a living and being a part of a healthy democracy.

Nor can one class appropriate the produce of the labour of another class, as the capitalists now appropriate and enjoy the wealth which the powers of the working man daily call into existence. It is inequality of exchanges which enables one class to live in luxury and idleness, and dooms another to incessant toil

The laboring man in this bounteous and hospitable country has no ground for complaint. His vote is potential and he is elevated thereby to the position of a man.

What the working-classes really need is to be allowed some part in the direction of public affairs.

Ninety percent of the racial debate is really about economics.

Can we blame an elector of the poorer classes, who has only the choice among two or three rich men, for requiring from the one he votes for a pledge to those measures which he considers as a test of emancipation from the class-interests of the rich?

Spain is a republic of workers of all classes.

Entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Since the equality of fortunes reigns in the North, and slavery does not exist there, man finds himself absorbed with those same material wants which the white man disdains in the South. He knows it admirable to take advantage of nature and men to produce riches.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live…. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

Unless you’re at the very top, you need a more equitable economy.

Ours is a sort of corporate society with a democratic safety valve.

A highly efficient and profitable capitalist system would make possible a welfare state, redistribution of income and greater social opportunities for all..

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.

On the one side stand the corporate interests of the United States, the moneyed interests, aggregated wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless.... On the other side an unnumbered throng, those who gave the Democratic party a name and for whom it has assumed to speak.

Very few of the rich are in the army except as officers. Our mission is to disenthrall just such men, to open up before them a brighter future for themselves and their children. Labor must be dignified in the south, and all must have an equal chance.

If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, they are doomed for all time. It is not a case of ethics; it is a plain case of necessity. The method by which this may be done is, first, for the American Negro to achieve a new economic solidarity.

One of the basic tenets of the working class is you want to get out of the working class.