Today in Labor History March 25, 1931: The authorities arrested the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama and charged them with rape. The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American youths, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused of raping two white women. A lynch mob tried to murder them before they had even been indicted. All-white juries convicted each of them. Several judges gave death sentences, a common practice in Alabama at the time for black men convicted of raping white women. The Communist Party and the NAACP fought to get the cases appealed and retried. Finally, after numerous retrials and years in harsh prisons, four of the Scottsboro Boys were acquitted and released. The other five were got sentences ranging from 75 years to death. All were released or escaped by 1946. Poet and playwright Langston Hughes wrote it in his work Scottsboro Limited. And Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son was influenced by the case.
Today in Labor History March 9, 1911: Frank Little and other free-speech fighters were released from jail in Fresno, California, where they had been fighting for the right to speak to and organize workers on public streets. Little was a Cherokee miner and IWW union organizer. He helped organize oil workers, timber workers and migrant farm workers in California. He participated in free speech fights in Missoula, Spokane and Fresno, and helped pioneer many of the passive resistance techniques later used by the Civil Rights movement. He was also an anti-war activist, calling U.S. soldiers “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniforms.” 1917, he helped organize the Speculator Mine strike in Butte, Montana. Vigilantes broke into his boarding house, dragged him through the streets while tied to the back of a car, and then lynched him from a railroad trestle. Prior to Little’s assassination, Author Dashiell Hammett had been asked by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to murder him. Hammett declined.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the life of Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927), a West Indian-American writer, speaker, educator, political activist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by union leader A. Philip Randolph as the father of Harlem radicalism and by John G. Jackson as "The Black Socrates." Harrison’s activism encouraged the development of class consciousness among workers, black pride, secular humanism, social progressivism, and free thought. He denounced the Bible as a slave master's book, and said that black Christians needed their heads examined. He refused to exalt a "lily white God " and "Jim Crow Jesus," and criticized Churches for pushing racism, superstition, ignorance and poverty. Religious extremists were known to riot at his lectures. At one of his events, he attacked and chased off an extremist who had attacked him with a crowbar.
In the early 1910s, Harrison became a full-time organizer with the Socialist Party of America. He lectured widely against capitalism, founded the Colored Socialist Club, and campaigned for Eugene V. Debs’s 1912 bid for president of the U.S. However, his politics moved further to the left than the mainstream of the Socialist Party, and he withdrew in 1914. He was also a big supporter of the IWW, speaking at the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, and supporting the IWW’s advocacy of direct action and sabotage. In 1914, he began working with the anarchist-influenced Modern School movement (started by the martyred educator Francisco Ferrer). During World War I, he founded the Liberty League and the “Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro,” as radical alternatives to the NAACP. The Liberty League advocated internationalism, class and race consciousness, full racial equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, and armed self-defense.
I am concerned that with the messes in both Ukraine and Gaza, a civil war here could potentially attract enough intervention to link all three conflicts together: Turtle Island, Europe, and the Middle East.
Here's the scenario:
Putin has intervened here for Trump before and no doubt already is again. Now the stakes are higher: Trump in the White House or a high level civil war here both cut off US aid to Ukraine. Europe will have a difficult time replacing that, encouraging all of Europe also to intervene here. The possibility of a wider war in Europe cannot be ruled out, especially if Putin blames a nearby NATO state for Ukraine surviving a US aid cutoff. Long shot, but not impossible.
There is also the role of the US in Gaza. Fighting here could put an end to US involvement there, but most likely enough of the rich would control enough of the arms industry to keep that flowing. You can bet it's a higher priority than Ukraine to them. This encourages Israel to intervene here to protect the US side of their arms industry. Again, this may already be taking place. Also again, the rest of the Middle East will have to find ways to counter that. Like the war in Europe, the war in Gaza has potential to spread to much more of the Middle East. Hopefully will not, but it could.
The result is that the war on Turtle Island in a worst case scenario could become linked both to a broader war in the Middle East and to a broader war in Europe.
That is a world war by definition, even though it would be a multipolar and non-nuclear one.
@LukefromDC
I had a friend named Rick in high school. Rick was in the closet until he was 25.
Rick left our hometown after he came out. He moved to a small town in Indiana where he began to identify and dress as a female. She called herself Rose. One day in 2011 Rose was beaten into a coma by three white Christians (Rose / Rick was a Latino / Latina) for the crime of crossdressing. She died in the hospital after regaining consciousness and finding she was paralyzed from the waist down. I found out what happened a few years later when I found his/her father on Facebook. I had also left my hometown because it's filled with the types that would later support MAGA and there were no jobs. I wish I could go back in time and tell Rose to move to California and not rural Indiana. #LGBTQRights#lynching#Christian
Today in Labor History December 17, 1951: American Civil Rights Congress (CRC) delivered their "We Charge Genocide" paper to the UN. They accused the U.S. government of genocide based on the UN Genocide Convention, citing many instances of lynching, legal discrimination, disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, police brutality and systematic inequalities in health and quality of life. The U.S. government and press accused the CRC of promoting Communism. The State Department forced CRC secretary William L. Patterson to surrender his passport after presenting the petition to the UN.
Today in Labor History October 26, 1892: Ida B. Wells published “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” which led to threats against her life, and the burning down of her newspaper’s headquarters in Memphis. Wells, who was born into slavery, was a journalist, educator, feminist, and early Civil Rights leader who helped found the NAACP.
The appeal trial of 102 people accused of having lynched to death Djamel Bensmaïl, a young painter who came to help put out deadly fires in Kabylia, in northern Algeria, during the summer of 2021 and wrongly taken for a arsonist, opened on Sunday October 15 in Algiers, noted an AFP journalist......
On #ThisDayInHistory in 1972, the US #Navy tolerated a race-riot and virtual #lynching by angry white racists, and punished only the black sailors who dared to fight back.
Check out my new article, co-authored with some very swell gents. We find that lynch victims' surviving family members were more likely to move out of the county than were other people living in their census districts. People victimized by the US regime of violent racial terror respond the same way that other terrorism victims do. Implications for dispossession & reparations.
“We waited 14 years for him”: Mother of Muslim teenager lynched in Jaipur
Mohammad Iqbal, a 17-year-old Muslim boy was lynched to death by an alleged Hindu mob after he was involved in a bike accident with a Hindu in the capital of Rajasthan, Jaipur. Iqbal endured injuries in the accident but the mob started lynching him after inquiring about his name, local media reported.
12-Year-Old Adivasi Boy Dies After Alleged Attack by Lynch Mob for 'Stealing' Food
The boy, who belonged to the Lodha Sabhar community, was brutally attacked after a local Trinamool Congress leader allegedly instigated the mob to teach the boy a 'lesson'.
Today in Labor History September 28, 1919: Thousands of whites rampaged through Omaha, Nebraska, setting fire to the Courthouse, lynching Will Brown, a black civilian, and attempting to hang the reformist mayor. 2 whites died. It followed more than 20 race riots across the U.S. that summer. Several years earlier, ethnic Irish rioters drove the entire Greek community from Omaha. The African-American population of Omaha had doubled from 1910-1919. Many had been recruited to work as strike breakers in the stockyards, exacerbating the racism of white workers in town. Then a white woman falsely accused a black man of raping her. Will Brown was arrested, but the woman was unable to positively ID him. But the racist crowd didn’t buy it and lynched him anyway.
Delhi man tied to pole, beaten to death on suspicion of stealing sweets
It is alleged that a group of men who had set up a Ganpati stall assaulted the ‘mentally unstable’ man for stealing ‘prasad’ from the stall; father blames residents, allegedly Hindus, for not trying to rescue the man.
He live-streamed his attacks on Indian Muslims. YouTube gave him an award.
The Post reviewed more than 140 accounts of cow protectors on Facebook, who often uploaded bucolic videos of injured or abandoned cows being nurtured and fed. But roughly 30 percent of the accounts resembled a hardcore, extrajudicial version of “Cops,” replete with posts of car chases, arrests and beatings.
Even After Monu Manesar's Arrest, Junaid and Nasir's Kin Continue to Face Hardships, Live in Fear
The families of the Junaid and Nasir had been waiting for justice for seven long months in Rajasthan’s Ghatmeeka. The two men were allegedly attacked and abducted by a mob that later set them ablaze, alive in a car.
Accused in Nasir-Junaid Murder Case Monu Manesar Reveals Shocking Details During Interrogation
According to Manesar, the entire conspiracy was hatched eight days before the fateful night of February 14-15, when Junaid and Nasir were abducted and subsequently burned alive. The planning encompassed every detail of the operation, including the when, how, and where of abducting both victims.
Today in Labor History August 28, 1955: Teenager Emmett Till was brutally murdered on this day in Money, Mississippi, for speaking "inappropriately" to a white woman. The brutality of the murder and the lack of justice for his family helped to mobilize opposition to segregation in America. An all-white jury acquitted Till’s killers, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam. The next year, both men publicly admitted in an interview with Look magazine that they had tortured and murdered the boy. The magazine paid them selling $4,000 (equivalent to $43,000 in 2022) for the story. Between 1876 and 1930, over 500 African Americans were lynched in Mississippi, alone, and over 3,000 across the South. A memorial marker for Emmett Till, erected in 2006, was defaced with "KKK", and then completely covered with black paint. 8 more markers were erected at sites associated with Till's lynching in 2007. Some of these were vandalized, too. One of the signs received over 100 bullet holes. In 2018, three University of Mississippi students were suspended from their fraternity after posting to Instagram a photo of them posing in front of the bullet-riddled marker, with guns.
Algeria: appeal trial begins for around a hundred people accused of lynching a man during the 2021 fires (globeecho.com)
The appeal trial of 102 people accused of having lynched to death Djamel Bensmaïl, a young painter who came to help put out deadly fires in Kabylia, in northern Algeria, during the summer of 2021 and wrongly taken for a arsonist, opened on Sunday October 15 in Algiers, noted an AFP journalist......