The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.11           March 18, 1996 
 
 
25 And 50 Years Ago  

March 19, 1971

NEW YORK - A March 6-7 women's liberation conference, sponsored by the New York Women's Strike Coalition and hosted by Barnard and Columbia Women's Liberation, drew 1,200 women from high schools and colleges throughout New York State and new England. It was the largest women's liberation conference yet held in New York, and all who participated considered it a tremendous success.

The opening session featured the 87-year-old suffragist Florence Luscomb. Luscomb spoke of the other women's conferences she had attended seventy, eighty years ago - the first being one she went to as a child of five with her mother.

The best-attended workshops were on lesbianism, on living with a man, and on alternatives to the family, indicative of the radical questioning that has characterized feminism. In abortion workshops, women made plans to bring women from their campuses to the March 27 demonstration in Albany. Women will be fighting attempts to cut back on gains won a year ago in New York that strengthened women's right to abortion.

Third World women announced plans for a March 20 speak-out at Harlem Hospital, demanding better abortion, gynecological and child- facilities at the hospital. High School sisters circulated a petition demanding birth control and abortion counseling in the schools. And women discussed ways of using the United Women's Contingents to mobilize women to march against the war April 24 in Washington.

March 16 1946

Nation-wide protest by labor, Negro and civil rights organizations against the savage Jim-Crow atrocities and bloody warfare unleashed by state troops on February 25 upon the entire segregated Negro section of Columbia, Tennessee, have borne bruit. The last 13 of 101 Negroes arrested and held incommunicado were released March 8 upon payment of $46,000 bail. The cash was put up in the Sheriff's office by the national Association for the Advancement of Colored People and by local Negro citizens.

Two of the arrested victims, William Gordon and James W. Johnson, were lynched inside Maury County jail, shot down in cold blood by the guards. Instead of being taken to the nearby City Hospital, the wounded men were driven to a segregated hospital in Nashville, 43 miles away. Both men died before they could reach the hospital.

Thurgood Marshall, special counsel for the NAACP, charged on march 1 that the Jim-Crow atrocities were "closer to the action of the German storm troopers than any recent police action in this country, the South not excepted." He declared that the "wanton double murder" of the two Negroes in jail was a "further example of lawlessness on the part of Tennessee law enforcement officers" and that "no Negro in that area has the semblance of constitutional rights."

 
 
 
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