Which Side Are You on? Mike Quill against Irish America

Which Side Are You On? is a film about the life and times of Michael J. Quill, and his fellow transport workers in New York City. Revered by Martin Luther King, reviled by J Edgar Hoover, he brought the entire city of New York to its knees in his battle for worker’s rights. In telling Mike Quill’s story Which Side Are You On? tells the story of race and class in New York from the 1930s to the 1960s. When Quill arrived in NYC in 1925, he saw before him a divided society. One in which, for a hundred years, wave after wave of European immigrants - mainly Irish - had waged a relentless economic war against black workers, opposing their emancipation from slavery, denying them membership in most unions and driving them further and further to the fringes of American society. What makes Quill’s story remarkable is that in a few short years, this witty, pugnacious son of a Kerry farmer would face down Irish America – the benevolent societies, the political machine, the police, the bishops - call time on a system of labor organization that excluded Black workers and issue a clarion call to unite the working-class of the US regardless of color, creed, or race. My paper will explore how for Quill, born into an Irish-speaking family in Co. Kerry, who fought on the losing side of Ireland's Civil War and was forced into exile in the U.S., Irishness was less an ethnic label, and more a value system that included amongst its tenets distrust of power, belief in collective action and affinity with the dispossessed.