Alicia Garza Quotes

Until we can democratically control the wealth that is created from our labor, there isn't real democracy.

Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We're clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven't reached true democracy yet.

Without the power of the Industrial Union behind it, Democracy can only enter the State as the victim enters the gullet of the Serpent.

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.

Martin Luther King was a misguided leader. He worked to be recognized as the leader of black America when what black America needs isn't a leader, it is education.

The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.

What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.

In 1968, the sanitation workers of Memphis tried to form a union. The city resisted. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life.

The only thing that stands between corporate greed and poverty is the union.

Labor has no quarrel with capital, as such. It is merely the possessors of capital who refuse to accord to labor the recognition, the right, the justice which is the laborers' due, with whom we contend.

As part of the realization of the aim to eradicate racism in our country, we must strive to create and strengthen a black capitalist class… because we come from among the black oppressed, many among us feel embarrassed to state this goal as nakedly as we should.

Spain is a republic of workers of all classes.

Economic democracy and political democracy are like two legs of a person. They must go side by side…. Once people know about their rights and claim their rights, nothing is going to stop them.

Labor is marching toward the goal of industrial democracy and contributing constructively toward a more rational arrangement of our domestic economy.

My heart lies with the workers.

… when so many people seem to be beset by fears of socialism and communism, it seems particularly important that the workers of our country should have an opportunity to study the labor movement and the economic problem of the day. Only through understanding can they be expected to look at questions in a comprehensive way. Our great difficulty in the past has always been that individual groups only see their own point of view and could not understand the situation as a whole.… Those who are interested in the future development of this country must be interested in the education of the workers.

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

Unions have long championed measures to reduce social and economic inequality, and efforts to weaken the labor movement at both the state and federal level have successfully stalled any progress.

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.

All my life, I've been lucky to work in social justice, starting as a labor organizer working with low-wage working women.

Historians have often censored civil rights activists' commitment to economic issues and misrepresented the labor and civil rights movements as two separate, sometimes adversarial efforts. But civil rights and workers' rights are two sides of the same coin.

Before there were unions, there was no middle class.

Dr. King's last campaign was a labor struggle. Many people are aware that King was assassinated in Memphis in the spring of 1968. Less well-known is what drew him there: solidarity with city sanitation workers, who, without the benefit of union representation, were rising up to protest humiliating pay and deplorable working conditions.