Vol. 71/No. 8      February 26, 2007

The strike was sparked by the death in detention of Dr. Neil Aggett, a young white physician who was secretary of the African Food and Canning Workers Union, which is mostly Black. Aggett, who was arrested on November 27 along with sixteen other opponents of the white supremacist regime in South Africa, had been held under the Terrorism Act, which allows the government to hold suspects without trial for as long as it chooses. He was found hanged in his cell on February 5, in what prison authorities claim was a suicide.  
 
February 25, 1957
Ninety-seven Southern Negro leaders wired President Eisenhower, Feb. 14, that they would organize a mass march on Washington if he maintains his silence about the white-supremacist reign of terror in the South. The 97, who are spokesmen of Negro communities in 10 Southern states, met in New Orleans last week in a two-day Southern Negro Leaders Conference. Referring to the telegram to Eisenhower, Rev. Martin Luther King of Montgomery, Ala., told the press that thousands of Negroes, joined by thousands of whites in both the North and South would go to Washington.

As the Negro leaders wired Eisenhower that they are faced with what appears to be an organized campaign of terror and violence, a dynamite explosion in the heart of the Negro section of Clinton, Tenn., injured a woman and baby and damaged 30 homes. Police also said they have made no arrests.  
 
February 27, 1932
The latest dispatches from Berlin report the long expected announcement of Hitler’s candidacy in the coming presidential elections to be held on March 19. The New York Times of February 24, 1932, in its editorial comment on this subject, chides the German reactionary briskly for his “tactical” mistake. “By lining up with the venerable president of the Reich,” the Times goes on to say, “he would have added to his dimensions as a responsible statesman without surrendering anything of his prestige as a crusader.” It is quite plain that Wall Street is rather vexed with the developments in German internal policy. Reconciled for some time now with Fascist ascendancy it nevertheless dreads the thought of social convulsions conjured up by the picture of a break with “legalism” by the Nazi leader, to whose popularity with international reaction it has, of late, contributed not a little.  
 
 
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