Join us in circulating widely the last two issues of the Militant and winning another 650 subscribers over the next week. Join us in reaching for the goal of signing up 3,000 new readers by June 7!
It is a necessary response to the latest spike in the number of deaths of coal miners. A response that many working people react to eagerly. Here are a few examples.
“Three supporters of the Militant sold 79 copies and 7 subscriptions to the paper this afternoon to miners and other working people in Harlan County, Kentucky, along State Route 38, which is dotted with mine after mine, including the Darby Mine where five workers were killed last week,” said Sam Manuel, the Militant’s Washington correspondent, in a May 26 note from Harlan.
“‘Unionize the mines! I’ve got to have one of those papers,’ Jason Harrison, 32, a member of the Communications Workers of America, told us. His union went on strike three years ago against AllTell Kentucky. ‘We didn’t win anything,’ Harrison said, ‘but we kept our dignity. That’s important.’
“‘Is this that paper?’ asked Martha Swanson, holding out $3, after word had spread in the small mining towns here about the issue with the banner headline ‘Unionize the mines! Build the UMWA!’ being sold here. ‘I want three copies.’ Swanson said her husband is a retired miner and her son-in-law works at the nearby Cumberland Mine. ‘It’s criminal what happened to those miners,’ she said. ‘Someone should to go to jail for this.’”
Militant readers from Des Moines, Iowa, and St. Paul, Minnesota, met and sold the paper together in Albert Lea, Austin, and Faribault—all towns in Minnesota with large concentrations of meatpacking workers—during the Memorial Day weekend, reported Frank Forrestal, a Militant supporter in Des Moines. “We netted 31 new readers,” he said. “Joe Swanson, also from Des Moines, reported that a door-to-door team he was part of the same weekend at coal mining towns in southern Illinois signed up another six subscribers.”
During a similar visit to Kearny, Arizona, near the Asarco copper mine that workers struck last year, Militant supporters sold 7 subscriptions and 24 copies, most of them at the entrance to the mine, said Naomi Craine, a garment worker in Los Angeles.
Similar teams are fanning out to U.S. coalfields this week—from Alabama, to Kentucky, West Virginia, and Utah.
Join one of them by contacting our distributor nearest you or the Militant directly (see directory on home page). Or order a bundle to sell subscriptions in your area. You can also order last week’s issue at the special price of 20 cents per copy, and sell both together till June 14, when the next issue will be published. Take the Militant everywhere you go and introduce it to co-workers, family, and friends.
Working people need it.
Sincerely,
Argiris Malapanis, Editor
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