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Vol. 73/No. 19      May 18, 2009

 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
May 18, 1984
CLIFTON-MORENCI, Ariz.—The National Guard has returned to this copper mining area for the second time during the strike against the Phelps Dodge Corp., the state’s largest copper producer. Copper miners have been on strike against the company since July 1983, for over 10 months.

The Arizona guard was sent in by Democratic Gov. Bruce Babbitt on Sunday, May 6, on the heels of a police assault led by Department of Public Safety officers against a May 5 strike solidarity march and rally.

At least 12 strikers and supporters were arrested on trumped-up charges ranging from “unlawful assembly” and “inciting to riot,” to “aggravated assault.”

Last August, Babbitt sent hundreds of heavily armed guardsmen into Morenci and Ajo, centers of the copper strike.  
 
May 18, 1959
A mighty nationwide roar of anger is rising from American Negroes in the wake of the Poplarville, Miss., lynching, the rape of a Negro co-ed by four white men in Tallahassee, Fla., and the refusal of Monroe, N.C., courts to punish white men for crimes against Negro women.

The call by a Negro leader in Detroit for a protest “March on Mississippi” is reverberating through the Negro press. Students at the Negro university in Tallahassee have staged a strike and demonstrations and with colored townspeople have jampacked the courtrooms to emphasize their demand that Florida’s rape laws at last be equally enforced.

In North Carolina the NAACP leader of Union County has urged Negroes to resist “violence with violence” even if it means “laying down your lives.”  
 
May 19, 1934
Now it is opportune for us to take a look at [John] Dillinger [a famous bank robber], to examine and interpret this one-man crime wave from the Bolshevik point of view.

The bourgeoisie can condemn him. Mr. Dillinger frightens them. They live in mortal terror lest he be apt to steal from them that money which they have in turn squeezed from the hides of the workers. Should we not, then, take him to our bosoms: “The enemy of our enemy is our friend.” He is called a Robin Hood, a friend of the oppressed.

And nothing could be further from the truth. True, he expropriates the expropriators. But to whose purpose? The working class, or Mr. Dillinger’s own selfish purposes, and those of his henchmen? Dillinger robs the possessing class, but only in order to become a member of that class himself.  
 
 
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