Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Quotes

fell in love with my country—its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people. . . . It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class. —Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

I fell in love with my country—its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people. . . . It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class. —Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change. Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis—a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s. She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his campaigns for the presidency. She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leader of the American Communist Party, who was then languishing in jail, a victim of the McCarthy era: “Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn! May the sense of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart!

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, then a young, enthusiastic, fiery union organizer announced that she would speak in Paterson. Chief of Police Bimba stated publicly that she would not. “But I have a right under the Constitution to speak,” Elizabeth protested. “You may have the right,” the police chief rejoined, “but we have the power, and we will prevent you.” Elizabeth did not speak. That has been my situation for the past half century. I have had the ‘right’ to speak, write, print, publish but my words dropped into the well of oblivion. I have had the ‘right’ to teach, but no university or school in the country would accept me…

The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography (My First Life 1906–1926) by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (International Publishers, 1955) and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary by Lara Vapnak in the Lives of American Women series, edited by Carol Berkin (Westview Press, 2015). Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology edited by Joyce L. Kornbluh (CH Kerr Publishing, 1955); Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the IWW by Stewart Bird, Deborah Shaffer, and Dan Georgakas (Lakeview, 1985); The Wobblies: The Story of the IWW and Syndicalism in the United States by Patrick Renshaw (Ivan R.

You know that every year in the western part of the United States there are fruits and grains produced that never find a market; bananas and oranges rot on the ground, whole skiffs of fruits are dumped into the ocean. Not because people do not need these foods and couldn't make good use of them in the big cities of the east, but because the employing class prefer to destroy a large percentage of the production in order to keep the price up in cities like New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Boston. If they sent all the bananas that they produce into the eastern part of the United States we would be buying bananas at probably three for a cent.