Students report up to 90 in academic classes, more than 100 in hygiene courses. They are forced to perch on radiators and window ledges, and are lined up on the floor.

Strikes have taken place so far in at least nine high schools, all in the southern part of Brooklyn. The New York Post estimated that 20,000 students were on strike on Friday, October 3.

The boycott began at Grady High School and Fort Hamilton High School early that week and quickly spread to Sheepshead Bay High School.

Then the students began reaching out to other schools in the area, leafleting subway stops and sending delegations to other schools. Each day more schools emptied out as students ran through the halls yelling, "Overcrowded classrooms--walk out!"

Students from several schools called a joint demonstration October 6 at New York Gov. Hugh Carey's office. Several hundred turned out and demonstrated for four hours against overcrowding.

The huge numbers in each classroom this fall are the result of thousands of teacher layoffs during the summer. Student demonstrators urged their teachers to support them, and carried signs from the recent United Federation of Teachers strike demanding smaller class sizes.  
 
October 16, 1950
BOMBAY, India, Oct. 5--Some 225,000 cotton textile and 3,000 wool textile workers have been on strike here since Aug. 14 in a struggle without parallel in India's working class history. Never before has so large a number of workers displayed such magnificent solidarity. For the first time since Aug. 15, 1947, the workers have engaged in a sustained struggle against not only their capitalist exploiters but the capitalist state as well.

The epic struggle of Bombay's textile workers has heightened the growing awareness among ever new layers that the Congress rulers are as much the workers' enemies as the British rulers in the past.

When the strike broke out, the government and the Congress union officials vied with each other in "killing" the strike in their press reports. Despite these notices of its "death," the strike was so alive that the Government and Congress union officials resorted to direct methods of strikebreaking. Meetings were banned in the city, militants arrested for peaceful picketing and Congress goons given a free hand to beat the strikers. Strikers who tried to defend themselves against the violence of the company hirelings were arrested, while the police let the Congress "Volunteers" go scott free.

The government's violence was climaxed when Home Guards, firing on people in private dwellings and on the streets, killed 10 and seriously wounded 60.