Political Quotes

“Mr. President, the State of Illinois is my home, and it holds an important place in the history of the American labor movement. All of us learned the name Upton Sinclair in our early days in school, the author of the 1906 novel ``The Jungle,'' which told the story of the horrendous working conditions endured by, largely, immigrant workers in Chicago's meatpacking plants and led to Federal regulation. A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of America's first unions for African-American workers, was a civil rights champion and a leader of the 1963 March on Washington. There is also the story of Mary Harris ``Mother'' Jones, an Irish immigrant who survived the Great Famine in Ireland, the yellow fever epidemic of 1867, which took the lives of her husband and children, and after her own dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, she went on to become a woman labor organizer and a fierce and beloved champion of coal miners. Before she died, she said she wanted to be buried in a place of honor among coal miners. She is buried in a town near my home called Mount Olive, IL, in the Union Miners Cemetery, the only union-owned cemetery in America. Aside from being legends of labor history, Upton Sinclair, A. Philip Randolph, and Mother Jones had something else in common.…”