“I wanted to do direct action.“ Casey Hayden (she was known then as Sandra Cason) had been instrumental in organizing the Students for Direct Action, based in the University Y near the campus. Her group talked and decided on a creative strategy. They would all go in a group, line up, ask to buy a ticket for themselves and their […]
Karen Haram
“He (Hightower) was such an enthusiastic promoter, and that he did such a good job getting the word out about Texas foods and Texas wines. California was always the end-all, be-all with the whole California food movement. Suddenly, we were doing the same thing here in Texas, with more personality. I think we sold it better, frankly. What I remember […]
Lacy Fryer (D)
“Lacy (Fryer) took me underneath his wing. I would not have been a regional director had he not been here. Before he left, he said, I have been training you, I’ve been watching you for years because I want to leave a legacy behind. I want someone to follow in my footsteps to make sure that the things that have been done in […]
Lonnie Fogle
“In Nacogdoches the theaters integrated. When they said ‘integrated’, it means the blacks sit in the balcony and the whites sit downstairs. But in Austin on the Drag, we were not even offered that opportunity at the Varsity and the Texas Theater. There was a newspaper article that featured Booker T. Bonner sitting on a upside down bucket with some […]
Rebecca Flores
“In July of 1988, Cesar (Chavez) started a fast, and he call it the Fast for Life. And this was really around the issue of pesticides, because he had seen that even though we’d been talking about it and we knew there were cancer clusters and we knew children were dying at a very, very young age. They’re like 10,11 […]
Kate Fitzgerald
“(M)y mandate from Hightower…was: “Do something with existing resources within TDA to help create new markets for farmers and at the same time address hunger.” …In the same way that agriculture was becoming concentrated, the grocery store industry was becoming concentrated…The effect it had was the creation of what’s now known as the food desert. (Hightower) saw it as a […]
Nancy Epstein
“(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 […]