“(W)we were the first state exchange with Israel. At the time that I left, there were 21 states that had their own memoranda of agreement with Israel. They weren’t all agriculture, some were commerce, some were technology. But we were the first that created a whole movement… There was funding from the Meadows Foundation to begin a demonstration farm in […]
Alice Embree
“I think the Rag is like the movement. It’s the idea that you can make history, that you don’t need to wait around for the next election. You can create something that will change people, change opinions, build a community, build a social movement.” Alice Embree was a founder of The Rag in 1966, and is featured in PHIT’s documentary about The Rag. She was […]
Robert del Grande
“Jim Hightower was the more eloquent voice of all of us and drew us all together. It helped everything because we all concluded that we were individuals but we would be better if we all worked together as a group. I remember saying that one restaurant cannot support one purveyor. The purveyor, the grower, the farmer need multiple people so […]
Susan DeMarco (D)
“The natural state of food production is that it’s small-scale, agrarian, and local. This is because plants and animals are living creatures. Economies of scale are achieved at a surprisingly small level, with both productivity and quality being enhanced by the ability of farmers and artisans to be personally involved with their crops and livestock. But the agribusiness powers perverted […]
Ben Delgado
“I was the mechanic, the admin guy who knew how to do contracts, knew who to call, figure out how to hire people how to bring people on board, how to schedule things out, how to organize meetings, all the understated and underappreciated, even to this day, admin stuff that has to happen in order to make an organization work…I […]
David Davis
“I always thought the state government was there to protect the people. Big business has their own protection, but nobody was protecting people. That’s why we looked at consumer services as one of the things that we should do. I don’t know what they’re doing now, because we would certify under consumer services that the scales in the store when […]
David Currie
“In the agricultural world, what we’re doing with these farmers markets, in the GDP of the agriculture of Texas it’s not huge, but to the individuals that come here and sell these products, it may be why they get to keep living in this community. The other young lady that came after me, Bernadette (Pfieffer), the African American woman. That […]
Juanita Cox
“(W)ith Hightower, we were very proud, we were able to get even stronger pesticide regulations than what California had at that time….It was the combination of having people in office that cared about the people that harvest the food for this world. It was the power that the union had built in farm workers that said we want you to […]
Martin Burrell
“His (Jim Hightower’s) initiatives about working with small and minority businesses. That was one of the things that I learned from him, and I was able to use that. I’ve been using that, essentially built a career around strengthening the environment with women and minority business because his initiative was whenever we spend money, look for opportunities to do business […]
Brad Blanton
“The people who owned the theater chain in New York were embarrassed, particularly by the demonstration out there talking about the other demonstrations, and about them maintaining segregation. When they integrated all at once is like we certainly were victorious. We integrated 90 to 120 theaters. I can’t remember how many but a lot of theaters it was were suddenly […]