Vol. 74/No. 12      March 29, 2010

The union struck Massey subsidiaries in West Virginia and other states on Oct. 1, 1984. Massey refused to sign the national contract that the union negotiated with the Bituminous Coal Operators Association that was signed in the fall of last year. Seventy-three union members here in Mingo County in southern West Virginia are still on strike.

Massey is stepping up its violence against the strikers and UMW supporters. On March 15, a 16-truck convoy of loaded coal haulers rammed a small car off a West Virginia mountain road, crushing the car and hospitalizing the four miners who were riding in it. The strike supporters were heading for lunch at a union-organized center in Lobata, West Virginia.  
 
March 28, 1960
“A wave of concern for Southern Negro college students is stirring campus after campus in the North,” reported the March 20 New York Times. Surveying student actions at 18 major northern universities and colleges, the Times found that the issue has aroused students as had few others.

The paper’s observation that “there is a quality of invention to their work” was illustrated at Bennington College in Vermont where 20 girls staged a two-hour sit-down at a Woolworth lunch counter, refusing to buy anything.

At Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, 200 placard-carrying girls and 20 faculty members marched through the town March 22. The following day seven students picketed the local Woolworth’s but were hauled off to police headquarters where the police chief threatened to arrest them if they continued picketing.  
 
March 30, 1935
The inevitable world carnage is drawing near with a speed and precision that is reminiscent of the months that preceded July 1914.

The imperialist rulers, themselves subject to laws of development beyond their control, are plunging headlong into a new world war, and dragging the masses of the working people along with them, as the cannon fodder to be sacrificed on battlefields in order to determine which of the imperialist bandits, or which set of them, shall exercise the more dominant position in world finance, in world markets, in world politics. The friction among the competitors for leading position has reached that overheated stage where the tiniest spark throws the accumulated tinder into blazing flames.

No longer is the “coming war” to be visualized as something that may or may not appear in the remote future.  
 
 
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