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   Vol. 70/No. 11           March 20, 2006  
 
 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
March 20, 1981
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The United Mine Workers of America hit the Reagan administration and the coal bosses with a powerful show of force. On March 9 and 10 more than 170,000 miners stopped work and about 8,000 rallied in Washington to protest Reagan’s announced cutbacks in the black lung program for miners.

The right to organize a walkout like this, called a memorial, is contained in the union contract. And the miners put it to good use.

This is certainly the most powerful union response to Reagan’s budget cuts, and it is one of the most important signs yet of American workers fighting back against the capitalist economic crisis.

The miners fought hard to win black lung benefits. They provide some income compensation, safety standards, and special medical programs for miners and their survivors.  
 
March 19, 1956
The Montgomery Improvement Association, which is conducting the magnificent protest movement against Jim Crow segregation on the bus lines of Montgomery, Alabama, has issued an urgent appeal for funds. The bulk of this money was raised until recently by the underpaid Negro people of Montgomery through voluntary contributions of their nickels, dimes and dollars.

But the struggle to batter down color segregation on the bus lines of Montgomery is not the concern of the Negro community alone. On the contrary. It is a cause which is vital to all of the working people of this country and especially to the organized labor movement. The inspiring action organized and led by the Montgomery Improvement Association has done more to prepare the ground for the union organization of the open-shop South than anything the leaders of the combined AFL-CIO have done in the past decade.  
 
March 15, 1931
The splendid revolutionary struggle of the Indian masses against the rule of British imperialism has suffered another betrayal by their leader, Gandhi. It is not the first time that the “little man” played this ignominious role. In 1922, when the struggle for independence reached proportions threatening to the Empire, Gandhi was again at the helm of the movement and then, as now, he was there to call off the fight at the moment when the ferment in the masses reached a point too dangerous to the tottering rule of Great Britain.

Britain’s fierce struggle against Indian independence is easily understood when it is realized that without India, there is no British Empire. This is the key to the question. Gandhi and the Nationalist Party represent the interests of the native bourgeois and petty-bourgeois classes and in the present struggle, as in all others, they reflect the deep fermentation in the masses.  
 
 
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