One hundred Steelworkers, their families, and supporters packed the local Elks hall to rally for striking Newport News shipyard workers.

Called by the Roanoke Valley Central Labor Union, AFL-CIO, the rally was designed to show support for United Steelworkers Local 8888 members who live in northeastern North Carolina and work an hour and a half away at the Newport News shipyard.

Speeches and songs boomed out of the hall over a powerful sound system, attracting passersby and residents of the predominantly Black community.

“We are the target people,” said Ray Grant, a twenty-eight-year shipyard veteran, in opening the rally. “Tenneco is trying to break our backs, along with all of southern industry. We need to fight, because anything worth having is worth fighting for.”

Joe Coyne, president of the Roanoke Valley CLU and an official of the United Paperworkers, stressed the impact the Newport News strike will have on organizing efforts throughout the South.

“In North Carolina,” Coyne said, “only 6.3 percent of the work force is organized. Workers get paid from $1.60 to $2.60 an hour. But if we hang together in Newport News, we can whip the employers anywhere. And after we win, we have to organize the entire South, right down to the Florida Keys.”  
 
March 29, 1954
Secretary of State Dulles, Wall Street’s whip at the Inter-American Conference at Caracas, Venezuela, was described as returning to Washington “with a happy smile of triumph” and in a “victory mood.” What had he won and against whom?

Dulles’ objective was nailed precisely by Guillermo Toriello, Foreign Minister of Guatemala, the small Central American country of three million people that Dulles made his whipping boy at the conference. The aim of the Wall Street banker and State Department head, said Toriello, is “the policy of the big stick and dollar diplomacy in Latin America” and the “internationalization of McCarthyism.”

The conference adopted a resolution that, in effect, gave advance approval to U.S. intervention in any Latin American country whose form of government and economic policies do no meet with Washington’s approval.

McCarthyism in the United States is aimed at smashing the labor movement and destroying the rights of Negroes, Jews and other minorities. The “internationalization of McCarthyism,” as reflected in the Caracas conference, is aimed at smashing all struggles of the Latin American peoples for economic and social betterment, political freedom and release from the bonds of foreign domination.

It was not by accident that the vilest dictatorship and military regimes in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Venezuela, took the lead in pushing the U.S. resolution on “communism.”  
 
 
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