The Negro was a political football between his former slave master and Northern political adventurers. The economic basis of this contest was the power to tax, to float bonds, to award franchise: in short, to gain control over the financial resources of the newly organized States.
Debs is greater than Lincoln. Debs is the spokesman of the great struggling working class of all races, nationalities, creeds, sexes.
We seek the right to play our part in advancing the cause of national defense and national unity. But certainly, there can be no true national unity where one-tenth of the population is denied their basic rights as American citizens.
In every truth, the beneficiaries of a system cannot be expected to destroy it.
I personally pledge myself to openly counsel, aid, and abet youth, both black and white, to quarantine any Jim Crow conscription system.
Negroes must be free in order to be equal, and they must be equal in order to be free... Men cannot win freedom unless they win equality. They cannot win equality unless they win freedom.
Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.
I don't ever remember a single day of hopelessness. I knew from the history of the labor movement, especially of the black people, that it was an undertaking of great trial. That, live or die, I had to stick with it, and we had to win.
A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.
I am prepared to oppose a Jim Crow army till I rot in jail.
Lincoln was the spokesman of the rising capitalist class of the North, who viewed the emancipation of Negro slaves as indispensable to the development and triumph of the manufacturers and bankers of the industrial North, East and West over the slave-holder of the South.
We must develop huge demonstrations, because the world is used to big dramatic affairs. They think in terms of hundreds of thousands and millions and billions... Billions of dollars are appropriated at the twinkling of an eye. Nothing little counts.
