Velma Hopkins Quotes

They knew I'm going to fight you for...what I feel like is for the workers.

I surround myself with people. I know my limitations. And I'll surround myself with people that I can designate to be sure it's carried out...And if you can't do that, you're not an organizer.

And when we went down there, they told us, "You niggers can register but you're not going to have a nigger. We're not ready for a nigger to be elected officer." They didn't say Negroes, a nigger. And we sat there and looked at them.

They went on the air and labeled the union top and all the union leadership as communist that night at midnight (before an election).

The women were the backbone of that union.

We felt like that instead of those nationals sending in white organizers that would go to 256, we wanted them to go where the white workers were.

Shiloh was the only church that we could go into.

We had one voting place in Winston-Salem, Forsyth County, for blacks, Fairview School. And when we started our drive to get people to register, actually pulled it to its height, it was at that school. That's where the policeman came out there, in gear, to arrest everyone of us.

They were afraid of black people. They just couldn't stand to see, their nerves would not allow them to meet with ten black people without an attorney, whole lots of us.

We'd go to singing and he'd say, "Velma, how can you sing? They're working the hell out of you." And I said, "I'm singing the hell out of you."...it made you forget how hard you were being worked and the treatment you were going through. Singing is something that is good for the soul, and we used to do lots of it. We had to.

They called us niggers, communists, everything in the book.

Having a union made a lot of difference.

My training, I guess, came from coming from a mother and working in the church and in the school. I'd always participated in PTAs, and we had organizations. And I was head of an organization in the church. I got lots of my training from my pastor too.

Paul Robeson, they came and told us he had been to Russia and what communism was.

In the beginning of the union we set up, because we had poor people, they didn't have enough. And you couldn't go to the welfare or nothing if you were black. If you were black and had a clean house, you went to the welfare, you didn't get nothing. They'd tell you if you had a little old raggedy radio set, sell the radio and use that money. So we had clothes banks and things, and churches would contribute to that.