Vol. 74/No. 15      April 19, 2010

The mainly young women and men rose to their feet in a prolonged, chanting, footstomping ovation when Morgentaler entered the hall and told the crowd, “The fight is on!”

A sense of victory rang throughout the meeting. Against the efforts of the government, the courts, the police and the “right-to-life” anti-abortion forces, supporters of women’s rights had succeeded in keeping a Toronto abortion clinic open.  
 
April 18, 1960
A community-wide boycott of white business firms was launched in Jackson, Mississippi, April 8, extending the mass struggle for integration to every state in the South.

Racist hopes that mob action, campus expulsions and mass arrests would smash the movement have not been realized. An April 8 Atlanta dispatch in the Christian Science Monitor declared: “The Deep South’s millions of Negroes are united as they have never been before, in a militant crusade for social, political and economic rights… .

“What in the 1950’s was an anti-segregation fight conducted for the most part by national Negro leaders, with their batteries of strategists and attorneys, is now more of a popular movement of Negro men and women united by catalysts of student rebellion and church fervor.”  
 
April 20, 1935
SACRAMENTO, California—The eight militant workers who were convicted on April 1 of criminal syndicalism were sentenced for indeterminate terms of one to fourteen years by Judge Dal Lemmon last Saturday, after he had denied a motion for a new trial.

Norman Mini, after refusing to apply for probation was asked the usual question whether he could advance any reason why he should not be sentenced.

“Yes,” he said. “Our standing here is no accident. Our conviction is the logic of the class struggle. But the same class struggle that results in our conviction will some day generate an irresistible wave that will sweep everything this court and this State represents away forever. With this knowledge we can face our sentences confidently because we know that the future belongs to us.”  
 
 
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