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   Vol. 70/No. 1           January 9, 2006  
 
 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
January 16, 1981
January 7—Support for the national demonstration honoring Dr. Martin Luther King in Washington, D.C., January 15 is extensive and growing. Labor, civil rights, and student organizations are organizing hundreds of buses.

The march and rally, called just eight weeks ago by composer and singer Stevie Wonder, will demand that the slain civil rights leader’s birthday be instituted as a national holiday by an act of Congress. As part of the mobilization, petitions for the holiday demand—to be presented to Congress by Stevie Wonder—are being circulated nationally by the coordinators.

At least forty buses each are coming to the march from New York and Chicago, and dozens more from Boston; New Orleans; Houston; Gary, Indiana; Detroit; Birmingham; and Charleston, West Virginia.  
 
January 9, 1956
NEW YORK, Jan. 4—Columbus, Ohio police staged a savage assault at dawn yesterday on the mass picket line of the Westinghouse workers. One young union man, Troy Tadlock, 34, died after being worked over by the cops. Eight others were injured. Eighty-nine were jailed.

Yesterday’s police attack climaxes the vicious strikebreaking, union-busting campaign of the Westinghouse Corporation in this 80-day strike. The corporation has gone all out to get a back-to-work movement started.

The strikers have seen how quickly the courts gave anti-picket injunctions at the request of Westinghouse attorneys. They have seen how the company was able to mobilize the clergy to propose a holy election outside of the union on a back-to-work proposition.  
 
January 1, 1931
As the present world crisis grows in scope and intensity, gripping one industry after another furrowing its way to the very core of the complex capitalist structure, a good deal of ideological hardware undergoes a process of rapid corrosion. Not so long ago, “American” rationalization “scientific management” and the “technical revolution” were the inspiration of the entire capitalist world.

Today, with millions of workers pounding the pavements with an unprecedented tie-up in trade and an overloading of warehouses while countless families go unfed, unclothed and unprovided for—a different song is being sung.

In the six years between 1923 and 1929 the index of production rose 17 points, the index of employment at the same time fell 2.4 points!  
 
 
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