It was the most vicious strikebreaking assault to date in Blue Diamond Coal Company’s drive to keep the United Mine Workers out of its Stearns mine.

"They beat the hell out of me," reported a bandaged William King as he sat waiting for a strike meeting to begin at the Whitley City UMWA headquarters today.

"Four or five state police pulled me off private property, knocked me down, and beat me. Then they dragged me across the road. One of them mashed his foot on my neck. They put handcuffs on me and they still beat me."

Some 150 miners and supporters had gathered near the mine entrance Monday morning, determined to halt Blue Diamond’s running of a handful of scabs through the court-limited picket lines. It would have been the fourth day scabs had entered the mine.

Strikers overturned a truck and refused to leave, UMWA spokesperson Chuck Shuford told the Militant, "until Blue Diamond would sit down and bargain in good faith."

Then the state police began assembling, complete with helmets, masks, clubs, and body shields. At 2:00 p.m. they attacked.

Miners are quick to point out that they weren’t the only ones walking around with bandages the next day. Several state police were also injured.

"If it takes it, we’ll fight the whole state of Kentucky," said striker Ross. "We’re here to stay."  
 
October 27, 1952
The refusal of the Supreme Court to review the conviction of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, sentenced to death for atomic espionage, marks a new stage in the witch-hunt, and it is calculated to add new fury to the anti-communist war hysteria.

It took the case of Alger Hiss to throw the shadows of conspiracy over "communism" and to create an atmosphere of fear behind which the witch-hunters could operate with impunity. The aim of the Hiss trial was to undermine support for the victims of political persecution by presenting the movement of opposition to capitalism and its wars as a front for a cabal of spies penetrating the topmost positions of government to steal "secrets" for the Soviet Union.

If it can be said then that the witch-hunt got its first real virulence with the lurid publicity that surrounded the trial and conviction of Hiss, it will now get a bounding impetus from the blood offering the courts are demanding of the Rosenbergs. Let the legend be created that the country is so imminently threatened as to require a death sentence in peace-time and the most far-reaching anti-democratic measures, mild by comparison, will appear to be justified.

The Rosenberg decision above all else was an act of ruling class terror by a state that is preparing for a war of world conquest, a war directed primarily against the Soviet Union.

The demand for the commutation of the Rosenbergs’ sentence is part and parcel of the struggle for democratic rights. We endorse it fully and call upon all opponents of the witch-hunt to do likewise.  
 
 
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