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   Vol.65/No.15            April 16, 2001 
 
 
25 and 50 years ago
 
 
April 16, 1976
BOSTON--Amid shrieks of "Get the nigger, kill him!" a frenzied mob of racist white high school students came close to beating the life out of a Black man at the doorstep of Boston's city hall April 5.

The attack came moments after 200 white students left the city council chambers where they had staged an antibusing demonstration as part of a sweeping racist school boycott.

Having received the blessing of antibusing city council members, including Louise Day Hicks, president of ROAR, Boston's main antibusing group, the mob left the building.

Upwards of fifty of the whites broke away and chased the Blacks, seizing attorney Theodore Landsmark. Landsmark, executive director of the Boston Contractors Association, was on his way to a city hall meeting.

Outraged leaders of the Black community responded swiftly to the attack. More than 200 Blacks, encompassing a wide range of community leaders and organizations, turned out for a Massachusetts Legislative Black Caucus news conference on the city hall steps the next morning.

State Sen. William Owens blasted city officials. Their leadership and support of the antibusing organizations, he said, was "the cause of racist attacks by white youth on Black adults, youth, and young children."

He indicted Boston Mayor Kevin White for his refusal to provide adequate safety for Blacks. "We must come to the realization that if city and state officials will not protect us, we will ask for federal protection, and short of that we must protect ourselves," he said.  
 
April 16, 1951
New Deal, Fair Deal and Welfare State are now words of interest only to the students of history. By means of a few reforms, concessions and benefits the capitalists rulers of America were able to stagger through two terrible decades of depression and war. Today with the very existence of the profit system threatened on a world scale as never before, big business has launched a national offensive to beat down the living standards of the American workers, destroy hard-won reforms and undermine their organizations.

The N.Y. legislature, with Dewey and Wall Street guidance, murdered rent control, raised phone and utility rates. But the bill that sneaked through with the least publicity, one that will hurt thousands now but will scald millions of workers when the boom is over and the bust begins, is the Hughes-Brees unemployment insurance bill.

A checking system will be substituted for the fund whereby every benefit check a worker gets will be charged against his boss's individual account with the state. Each employer will be taxed according to how much unemployment benefits are paid to his workers. The lower the benefits, the lower the employer's tax. Can you see how this is going to work? Every boss will be opposed to every single claim filed by his workers. Workers will now get hearings instead of benefits.

The giant corporations haven't dared to kill unemployment insurance directly. They are slaughtering it piecemeal, making sure of its total ineffectiveness.  
 
 
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