Jacob S. Coxey Quotes
We will send a petition to Washington with boots on.
He started the first "march on Washington" in 1894. It was to protest unemployment.
Jacob S. Coxey, 1854-1951, Community Organizer, Speech, Massilon, OH, 1894
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation illustrates a new tactic adopted by the Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) in 2014. They trained very young children (with their parents permission) in how to handle themselves in a protest when the police arrive and tell them to disperse. By having children as young as 11 protesting shutting down streets in Washington so that they would get arrested. Coping with young children committing civil disobedience was something the police were not used to and involved much more complex procedures than arresting adult demonstrators. In addition, the sight of such young children being arrested for civil disobedience attracted much attention from the media, thereby publicizing the immigration issue. Elias and his mother were both U. S. citizens. In 2006 Elias’s father, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, returned to Mexico to apply for a visa to visit his wife and son. He was denied, so he crossed the border without papers. He was deported from the family home in 2008 and Elias and his mother had not seen him since then. Under the then existing immigration rules and laws, even a person whose spouse and children were U. S. citizens residing in America, could not even get a visa to visit them much less get citizenship. The Obama administration’s “family friendly” policies collapsed with immigration where the policies broke up otherwise intact families.
Kennedy was initially very opposed to a civil rights march on Washington and seemed very annoyed to the Blacks in attended. But when faced with the reality of the fact that the March was going to take place and he could not prevent it, he turned around and did everything he could do to protect the marchers and enable the historic event.
His strategy was to fill the jails of Birmingham, and asked the young people to help. The next days saw virtually all the Birmingham high school students our of school and in the streets protesting which was then against the un-Constitutional laws of Birmingham and Alabama. The students were arrested by the droves and the white authorities, believing that they were being firm against “radical lawbreakers”, fell into the trap, and became a travesty to most of the country and the rest of the world and the hundreds of jailed students beaten and assaulted raised the consciousness of whites as well as Blacks.
Jacob Sechler Coxey Sr., sometimes known as General Coxey, of Massillon, Ohio, was an American politician who ran for elective office several times in Ohio. Twice, in 1894 and 1914, he led "Coxey's Army", a group of unemployed men who marched to Washington, D.C., to present a "Petition in Boots" demanding that the United States Congress allocate funds to create jobs for the unemployed. Although the marches failed, Coxey's Army was an early attempt to arouse political interest in an issue that grew in importance until the Social Security Act of 1935 encouraged the establishment of state unemployment insurance programs.
