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   Vol. 69/No. 20           May 23, 2005  
 
 
25 and 50 Years Ago
 
May 23, 1980
Residents of Harlem marched and rallied here May 10 against FBI harassment.

During the predawn hours of April 19, fifty FBI agents armed with shotguns and automatic rifles had invaded the apartments of 92 Morningside Avenue.

Threatening and frisking tenants, the FBI went in without a warrant and bullied and detained several people under the pretense of searching for Joanne Chesimard.

Chesimard, also knows as Assata Shakur, escaped from a New Jersey prison last November, where she was serving a life sentence for allegedly killing a state trooper.

At the pre-march rally on the steps of 92 Morningside, nearly 200 people heard speakers denounce the raid and appeal for support.

Victor Goode of the National Conference of Black Lawyers recalled the 1969 police murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton. "A decade later, we are visited once again by a predawn raid by the FBI—at a time when the president and attorney general swear to us that the Cointelpro program doesn’t exist."

"It may not exist by that name," Goode said, "but it existed in operation by what they did that night at Morningside Avenue."

Demonstrators then marched through the streets to the Harlem State Office Building chanting, "FBI, we're warning you—no more attacks on 92!"  
 
May 23, 1955
British imperialism has been badly jolted by a strike wave—involving 40,000 workers and thousands of militant high school students—in Singapore, one of its Southeast Asia colonies. The island city, with a million and a half population—80% Chinese—is at the foot of the Malay peninsula. The British have governed it under a form of martial law—"emergency regulations"—for the past seven years.

The strike wave began when the Hock Lee Bus Co. set up a company union as a rival to a union formed by its workers. The 300 employes refused to join the company union and were fired. Thereupon they set up a picket line—where they lived in tents with cooking equipment, etc.—in front of the company garage.

The city's intensely anti-imperialist students came down to the picket lines in a mass with contributions of food, funds and entertainment. In the course of the long, bitter strike the students raised $60,000 for the bus and other strikers.

When police seized the tents, food, bicycles etc, of the strikers the pickets squatted on the ground with linked arms. They offered no resistance but proclaimed they would rather perish than move. Breaking the human chain with high pressure fire hoses, police closed in and beat the pickets, eight of whom were hospitalized.

The whole labor movement, which is in the process of a great organizing wave, was indignant. The streetcar men walked out in sympathy. Soon 50 more unions were on strike.  
 
 
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