Today in Labor History: March 28, 1968: Martin Luther King led a march of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Police attacked the workers with mace and sticks. A 16-year old boy was shot. 280 workers were arrested. He was assassinated a few days later after speaking to the striking workers. The sanitation workers were mostly black. They worked for starvation wages under plantation like conditions, generally under racist white bosses. Workers could be fired for being one minute late or for talking back, and they got no breaks. Organizing escalated in the early 1960s and reached its peak in February, 1968, when two workers were crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck.
Today in Labor History March 28, 1892: French anarchist, Ravachol, was arrested for blowing up the homes of two government officials. His attentat was in response to the police murders of 9 workers, who had been demonstrating for the eight-hour-day, on May 1, 1891, and for the Clichy Affair, that same day, when anarchists were arrested and tortured by police.
Today in Labor History March 21, 1965: 3,200 people began the third march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest racial violence. Earlier efforts to hold the march had failed when police attacked demonstrators and a minister was fatally beaten by a group of Selma whites. The five-day walk ended March 26, when 20,000 people joined the marchers in front of the Alabama state Capitol in Montgomery. This time they were defended by national guards and FBI agents. Soon after, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Today in Labor History March 12, 1912: The IWW won their Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, MA. This was the first strike to use the moving picket line, implemented to avoid arrest for loitering. The workers came from 51 different nationalities and spoke 22 different languages. The mainstream unions, including the American Federation of Labor, all believed it was impossible to organize such a diverse workforce. However, the IWW organized workers by linguistic group and trained organizers who could speak each of the languages. Each language group got a delegate on the strike committee and had complete autonomy. Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn masterminded the strategy of sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, drawing widespread sympathy, especially after police violently stopped a further exodus. 3 workers were killed by police during the strike. Nearly 300 were arrested.
The 1911 verse, by Poet James Oppenheim, has been associated with the strike, particularly after Upton Sinclair made the connection in his 1915 labor anthology, “The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest”
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
Today in Labor History March 7, 1932: Over 3,000 people, led by the United Auto Workers, marched on the main Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Workers on the Ford Hunger March were demanding that laid off colleagues be rehired. They also demanded a slow-down of the assembly lines and an end to the evictions of unemployed workers from their homes. Marchers carried banners saying "Give Us Work," "We Want Bread Not Crumbs," and "Tax the Rich and Feed the Poor." During the protests, police opened fire with machine guns, killing 4 and injuring 60. A fifth worker died later from his wounds. The Unemployed Council (part of the Communist Party) also supported the march.
Today in Labor History March 6, 1930: 100,000 people demonstrated for jobs in New York City. Demonstrations by unemployed workers, demanding unemployment insurance, occurred in virtually every major U.S. city. In New York, police attacked a crowd of 35,000. In Cleveland, 10,000 people battled police. In Detroit, the Communist Party organized an underemployment demonstration. Over 50,000 people showed up. Thousands took to the streets in Toledo, Flint and Pontiac. These demonstrations led to the creation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), sponsored by Republican congressman Hamilton Fish, with the support of the American Federation of Labor, to investigate and quash radical activities.
Today in Labor History March 5, 1965: A Leftist uprising against British colonialism erupted in Bahrain, known as the March Intifada. The uprising began after the Bahrain Petroleum Company laid off hundreds of workers at on March 5, 1965. Students at Manama High School, the only high school in Bahrain, went out into the streets to protest the lay-offs. Several people died in the clashes between protesters and police. The authorities quickly suppressed the uprising. However, as news of the crackdown spread, protests erupted throughout the country, creating a nationwide uprising which lasted for a month.
Today in Labor History March 5, 1917: Members of the IWW went on trial in Everett, Washington for the Everett Massacre, which occurred on November 5, 1916. In reality, they were the victims of an assault by a mob of drunken, vigilantes, led by Sheriff McRae. The IWW members had come to support the 5-month long strike by shingle workers. When their boat, the Verona, arrived, the Sheriff asked who their leader was. They replied, “We are all leaders.” Then the vigilantes began firing at their boat. They killed 12 IWW members and 2 of their own, who they accidentally shot in the back. Before the killings, 40 IWW street speakers had been taken by deputies to Beverly Park, where they were brutally beaten and run out of town. In his “USA” trilogy, John Dos Passos mentions Everett as “no place for the working man.” And Jack Kerouac references the Everett Massacre in his novel, “Dharma Bums.”
Another video of a cop kneeling on the back of a black person.
"Celena Morrison, the city’s executive director of the Office of LGBT Affairs — who videotaped a portion of the police encounter — can be heard saying, “He just punched me,” apparently referring to the trooper moments after he walked toward her. [...] The trooper can be heard telling Morrison to “shut the f— up.”"
It’s been a couple days now, but @radleybalko published the final part of his detailed refutation of the despicable revisionist conspiracies of George Floyd’s murder, perpetuated by the right-wing documentary The Fall of Minneapolis and various conservative “journalists”.
No individual or publication who promoted these conspiracies should be take seriously ever again.
Conflagration In Haldwani Was Preceded By A Spate Of Demolitions & The Steady Demonisation Of Muslims
Before fury over the demolition of a mosque and madrasa In Uttarakhand’s Haldwani city on 8 February led to the death of five Muslims and injuries to about 100 police, a pressure-cooker situation had built up in the state. More than 400 Muslim shrines and properties were demolished in 2023 and attacks, Islamophobic speech—including from the chief minister—and calls for the state to be cleansed of Muslims were rife. Article 14 found riot-hit families alleging police brutality, arbitrary detentions and no idea about how to get legal help.
#Israel / disproportionate police force and cruelty toward demonstrators raising concerns over the police's impartiality and commitment to public service
Footage emerged from a protest in #TLV showing police officers appearing to deliberately place a protester down onto horse manure on the ground, during a tense protest against the government's judicial overhaul plans on Kaplan Street, in which 21 protesters were arrested.
The Department for Investigations of Police Officers has opened a probe into footage showing a mounted officer striking a protester, who then collapsed.
Protesters are saying the police were serving the agenda of extremist ministers like Ben Gvir, rather than the public interest.
Today in Labor History February 24, 1912: The cops beat up women and children during the IWW-led Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Three people died during the strike. Unknown numbers were injured. The police arrested nearly 300 workers during the two-and-a-half-month strike. The authorities framed and arrested IWW organizers Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti for murder.
Today in Labor History February 19, 1912: During the IWW Bread & Roses Strike in Lawrence, MA, 200 police attacked 100 women picketers, knocking them to the ground and beating them. As a result, several pregnant women lost their babies.
Today in Labor History February 16, 1885: The Knights of Labor struck Jay Gould’s Wabash Railroad when he fired members of their union. The strike tied up the entire line in the Southwest. Members of the union on other railroad lines refused to operate any trains with Wabash cars on it. Gould eventually agreed not to discriminate any more against members of the union. As a result, membership in The Knights of Labor swelled. When they struck again in 1886, at least 10 people were killed. The strike unraveled within a couple of months, leading to the demise of the union.
Today in Labor History February 15, 1910: The ILGWU declared the Uprising of Twenty Thousand shirtwaist strike officially over. The garment workers strike began September 27, 1909, in response to abysmal wages and safety conditions. The majority of striking workers were immigrant women, mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews (75%) and Italians (10%), and mostly under the age of 20. Five women died in the strike, which the union won, signing contracts with 339 manufacturing firms. However, 13 firms, including Triangle Shirtwaist Company, never settled. One of the demands had been for adequate fire escapes and for open doors to the streets for emergencies. In 1911, 146 girls and women were killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
Today in Labor History February 12, 1983: One hundred women protested in Lahore, Pakistan against military dictator Zia-ul-Haq's proposed Law of Evidence (would make the testimony of women worth half that of men’s testimony in courts of law). The women were tear-gassed, baton-charged and thrown into lock-up. However, they were successful in repealing the law.
Today in Labor History February 11, 1937: General Motors recognized the United Auto Workers (UAW) following a 44-day sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, involving 48,000 GM workers. Two months later, company guards beat up UAW leaders at the River Rouge, Michigan plant. On January 11, police armed with guns and tear gas tried to storm the plant. Strikers repeatedly repelled them by throwing hinges, bottles and bolts at them. Fourteen strikers were injured by police gunfire during the strike.
We really need to stop buying into the argument that #ClimateActivists are "radical" or "destructive". The opposite is true: the nature of the protests have been peaceful and, on the whole, pretty tame.
The idea that, say, sitting on a road is "radical", "extreme" and "criminal" came from a bunch of #FossilFuel aligned think tanks, parroted by the media.
Reject them.
The framing needs to be: Fossil fuel companies are radical, extreme, criminal.
Several countries are adopting measures for peaceful demonstrators that are also used against organised criminals. These include early morning raids by counter-terrorism units and the use of undercover police to infiltrate groups."