Michael J. Quill Quotes
We may very well be making history here ... in the presence of the man who is entrusted with the banner of American liberty that was taken from Lincoln when he was shot 95 years ago … Dr. King was almost stabbed to death, has been shot at, has been arrested more often than anybody in the United States, south and north … Dr. King’s life at this moment is in just as great danger as was Lincoln’s. And he has to walk with care if he is to continue to lead this crusade
25 of the Union’s TWA Airline Workers in Memphis Tennessee had signed a petition to the Union objecting to the Union’s support for King’s desegregation campaign. Quill responded by inviting King to give the main address at the annual union convention. He was prophetic of the danger King faced, but died before King was assassinated.
Michael J. Quill, 1905-1966, President and Founder, Transport Workers Union of America, Member of the New York City Council (American Labor Party), Introduction of Martin Luther King Jr. at his Union’s Annual Convention, 1961
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Hoover and the FBI were supposed to be enforcing Federal law. However, they could not find any criminal activity on the part of Martin Luther King Jr. They regarded the Civil Rights Movement as a revolutionary threat to the nation. See {620621} and {74219} . So the FBI in an incredible abuse of power, had a meeting of its top officials to plan a strategy for destroying King as a Negro leader in America. We look back on this era where officials who were never elected by anyone, and having no authority from an elected official, took it upon themselves to decide who leaders in America would be.
In the early 1950s, most of the South was racially segregated. Though hard to believe today, the Alabama law then required a Black man or woman to sit in the back of the bus. Rosa Parks, a black woman, sat in a seat in the middle of the bus and refused to give up her seat to a white man. She just quietly sat in her seat. She was arrested, and this triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 which was a major event in the Civil Rights struggle. Alabama was not the only state where this type of outrage occurred. The South at that time was relatively backward educationally, commercially, and legally and racial segregation was a huge problem in most of the South.
Michael Joseph "Red Mike" Quill was one of the founders of the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU), a union founded by subway workers in New York City that expanded to represent employees in other forms of transit and the President of the TWU for most of the first thirty years of its existence. A close ally of the Communist Party USA (CP) for the first twelve years of his leadership of the union, he broke with it in 1948.
