Today’s labor quote: Charley Pride

“When I used to go to school and pledge allegiance to the flag, all those nice words about ‘liberty and justice for all,’ I just had to look out my window: We had to play basketball outside while the whites had a gym. But my mother told me to hang in there, that someday it would be different, and that kept me believing.”

The first major Black star in country music, Charley Pride got his start in the early 1960s, when his days were spent toiling in a smelter operated by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Helena, Montana. He died last Saturday at 86 of covid-19; read more in the Washington Post. He grew up in the Mississippi cotton fields; here’s Mississippi Cotton Picking Delta Town.