Vol. 71/No. 31      September 3, 2007

Ever since Angola won its independence from Portugal in 1975, both Washington and Pretoria have tried to impose a subservient, proimperialist regime there. These aims were thwarted soon after independence when the new Angolan government requested the aid of Cuban military forces to turn back a South African invasion.

Speaking in Bayamo, Cuba, on July 26, Cuban leader Fidel Castro … warned the South Africans, “If they attack the republic of Angola on a large scale and arrive at our defense lines, we are going to fight very seriously with all our means and energy against the racist, fascist South African mercenaries. We already fought those racists and fascists once, and they well know the tenacity, courage, and dedication of our fighters. It would be better for the imperialists to abandon their threats, because they are not going to intimidate us in that way.”  
 
September 2, 1957
The increasing momentum of the Negro people’s drive for first-class citizenship can be measured by Martin Luther King’s announcement, Aug. 27, in Washington, of a campaign to register five million Negro voters in the South.

Because of terror, fraudulent practices by lily-white election boards and unconstitutional statutes only 1,238,038, or one-fourth of eligible Negroes have been able to register in the South. The task the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has set itself is to register the other three-fourths.

[I]n the past few years in Mississippi, Rev. George W. Lee, a Negro, was shot to death for insisting upon registering. Lamar Smith, a Negro, was shot dead on a courthouse lawn before hundreds for “meddling in politics.” Gus Courts, the lone Negro registered in Belzoni after the lynching of Rev. Lee, was shot and has preserved his life only by fleeing Mississippi.  
 
September 3, 1932
SPRINGFIELD, Illinois, August 25—Forty thousand miners and families, in six thousand cars and trucks, forming an army eighty miles long, were ambushed and brutally attacked at the Franklin County border. The trek-worn miners were about to arrive at their destination when hired killers of the coal operators opened fire about 8 p.m. August 24. From their ambush of brushes and weeds, the murderers permitted some five hundred cars to enter the county and without warning opened fire with machine guns, rifles, shot guns, and pistols.

The killers, provided with torches, ignited gasoline, burning up cars, truck-loads of food and First Aid ambulances.

About 150 men, women, and children were shot down. The number of slain is undetermined as yet. The miners came peacefully and unarmed. They walked right into the jaws of death, only being able to resist with bare hands.  
 
 
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