Thank you for helping make the Militant’s spring circulation campaign a success!

More than 2,800 people subscribed in two months, exceeding the initial goal of 2,000. Welcome! More than half of the new readers signed up the first three weeks of the subscription drive.

That period coincided with huge immigrant rights rallies. On April 9-10 and again on May Day some 2 million people took to the streets each time, many of them downing their tools, to demand immediate legalization of the undocumented. The size, geographic spread, and proletarian composition of these actions was unprecedented for the United States, and that was reflected in Militant sales too. About 1,000 people subscribed at the immigrant rights rallies.

The final stretch of the campaign, which ended June 7, was second best. Nearly 500 people subscribed that week, a good number of them miners and their families throughout the U.S. coalfields. Militant readers took to heart the appeal from the paper to widely sell the issue featuring the front-page headline, “Unionize the mines! Build the UMWA! No miner has to die!”

Below are some of the reports readers sent in about these efforts, which show how more and more working people say they need the Militant to fight the bosses’ antilabor offensive and win.
 

Tilda Thomas met a team of Militant supporters June 2 outside the Harlan office of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). She was there with a dozen other family members of the miners who were killed underground to protest the exclusion of their representatives from the agency’s initial investigation of the miners’ deaths (see front-page article).

Militant supporters on that team—Sam Manuel from Washington; Rachele Fruit and Wes Lewis from Atlanta; Eddie Beck from Newark, New Jersey; and myself from Birmingham, Alabama—sold eight subscriptions and 188 copies of the paper in Harlan County. We sold many of them in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart and a local grocery store in Harlan. Time after time those buying the paper would point to the photos of the five miners who were killed at the Darby mine, published on the front page of the last issue, saying they were friends or relatives of those miners.

“I’ll take a subscription,” said Carson Whitehead. He was among many miners who stopped and purchased the paper at a railroad crossing on Route 38, which is dotted with a cluster of mines, including Darby Mine No. 1.

“What’s in your paper this week?” asked another miner whose wife had picked up a copy the week before.

Over two weekends Militant supporters sold 15 subscriptions and 318 copies of the socialist newsweekly in Harlan County.
 

The high point of our visit was the sale at Consol Energy’s non-union Bailey Mine in southwestern Pennsylvania, where we sold 17 papers. At one point, four cars coming out of the mine were lined up with drivers waving their dollar bills for the paper. One miner shouted: “We need the union!” Many of the very young miners stopped to talk to a Young Socialists member on the team.

Word spread inside the mine about the Militant’s headline that week: “Organize the mines!” This is a popular idea at Bailey, which employs many workers from mines that were previously organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). In the two days following the sale, supporters of the Militant who work at the mine sold four introductory subscriptions.
 

Ashley Williams, a 16-year-old high school student, answered the door during a visit to Worthington, Minnesota. Kin to a packinghouse worker who was injured on the job, she identified with the need to unionize the mines and other workplaces to enforce safety. Williams decided to subscribe on the spot. Reading the Militant, she said, “is important for those in my community and my family. There is no need for people to get hurt at work.”

As supporters of the Militant were about to leave, Williams’s mother entered the apartment. After discussing the importance of having a working-class newspaper and how workers around the world have more in common with each other than the bosses, she thanked the team for coming. Twenty minutes later she took her car to look for the sales team and bought her own subscription.
 

At the same time, donations from many readers made it possible to exceed the Militant’s fund drive goal. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Argiris Malapanis, Editor

Click here to see the sub drive scoreboard.
Click here to see the 'Militant' fund drive chart