Posted on 02/23/2011 2:21:48 PM PST by allmendream
"When I reached home (West Virginia) I found that the salt-furnaces where not running, and that the coal-mine was not being operated on account of the miners being out on a "strike". This was something which, it seemed,usually occurred whenever the men got two or three months ahead in their savings. During the strike, of course, they spent all that they had saved, and would often retrun to work in debt at the same wages, or would move to another mine at considerable expense. in either case, my observations convinced me that the miners were worse off at the end of a strike. Before the days of strikes in that section of the country, I knew miners who had considerable money in the bank, but as soon as the professional labour agitators got control, the savings of even the more thriftsy ones began disappearing."
Yup, that’s what they called ‘community organizers’ back in his day...
...but his analogy is still spot on!
My thoughts exactly! But professional labor agitator has a nice ring to it as well!
Well I’ll be darned.
Good find.
Booker T. had a lot of great things to say. But today he would be called a sellout - Oreo - Uncle Tom etc.
Great book.
Agreed. Actually...it would be worth it to get liberals to read it.
Thank you for digging up this salient quote! This is indeed an American classic that has always needed wider exposure.
These days, the only ones who lose during a strike are those striking. Companies pay for “strike insurance”. They can hang on for far longer than the average union worker. I don’t know about governments, but businesses long ago gained the upper hand over what many believed was highway robbery by union thugs. The sad thing is no one who is in a union really has any clout. They’re between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
I will not begin to tell you about Teachers’ Unions, but I can tell you from very painful experience the folks who have backed the NEA play hardball and take no prisoners. 41 years ago I could have told all of you this would happen, but as usual most Americans are too fat, dumb and happy to care about those who were on the front lines back in the day. Those were some very scary folks and they had no business being anywhere near children. My father was even an International Vice President of the Newspaper Guild. He had worked to maintain integrity for both sides as a negotiator for 25 years when the NEA hit town where he was President of the School Board as a “test” case. They threatened us night and day — 24/7. They followed us wherever we went. Yeah, they’re just swell folks. I’d let you talk to him, but he died two years after they finished with us. Lovely folks.
One of his contemporaries said of him “I knew most of the coloured men who at that time had become prominent as leaders of their race, but I had not then known one who was neither a politician nor a preacher.”
;)
LOL! Got that right!
They could all learn a lot reading Washington, Carver and Douglass . . . Oh well, I won't hold my breath!
From “Up From Slavery” about the “colored” people in Washington D.C..
“Among a large class there seemed to be a dependence upon the Government for every conceivable thing. The members of this class had little ambition to create a position for themselves, but wanted the Federal officials to create one for them.”
The more some things change, the more others just stay the same, apparently!
“The whole machinery of slavery was so constructed as to cause labour, as a rule, to be looked upon as a badge of degradation, of inferiority. Hence labour was something that both races on the slave plantation sought to escape. The slave system on our place, in a large measure, took the spirit of self-reliance and self help out of the white people. My old master had many boys and girls, but not one, so far as I know, mastered a single trade or special line of productive industry. The girls were not taught to cook, sew, or even to take care of the house.”
“Had (I) been a member of a more popular race, I should have been inclined to yield to the temptation of depending upon my ancestry and my colour to do that for me which I should do for myself. Years ago I resolved that because I had no ancestry myself I would leave a record of which my children would be proud, and which might encourage them to still higher effort”
“The thing that they (Amerindian students at Tuskegee) disliked most, I think, were to have their long hair cut, to give up wearing their blankets, and to cease smoking; but no white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.”
“At one time Mr. (Frederick) Douglass was travelling in the state of Pennsylvania, and was forced, on account of his colour, to ride in the baggage-car, in spite of the fact that he had paid the same price for his passage that the other passengers had paid. When some of the white passengers went into the baggage-car to console Mr. Douglass, and one of them said to him: “I am sorry, Mr. Douglass, that you have been degraded in this manner,” Mr. Douglass straightened himself up on the box upon which he was sitting and replied: “They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is in me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.””
“I early learned that it is a hard matter to convert an individual by abusing him, and that this is more often accomplished by giving credit for all the praiseworthy actions performed than by calling attention alone to all the evil done.”
“Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime in the South, or one third of its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnation, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic”
“He is too great for that (color prejudice). In my contact with people I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their soul in a way to permit them to come into contact with what is highest and best in the world.”
“Then decide within yourselves whether a race that is thus willing to die for its country should not be given the highest opportunity to live for its country”
“to build a house, or to be able to practice medicine, as well or better than someone else, they will be rewarded regardless of race or colour In the long run the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or previous history will not long keep the world from what it wants”
Great passages!
I am currently listening to “My Grandfather’s Son” Clarence Thomas’ biography, and it is remarkable. He has a lot in common with Booker T. Washington.
How long has that book been out again?
That is how long I have been saying “I need to read Clarence Thomas’ book!”
It is very compelling...I guess it has been out since 2007, I never got around to reading it.
Not only is his mindset very similar in a lot of ways to Booker T. Washington (Self reliance, hard work) but is completely and totally diametrically opposed to Barack Obama.
I am thinking of starting a thread on it...
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