Vol. 72/No. 34      September 1, 2008

The guardsmen rolled into town equipped with armored personnel carriers, Huey helicopters, automatic weapons, and massive supplies of tear gas. They took up positions directly on Phelps Dodge property, overlooking the gates of the mine and the union picket lines. Hundreds of state troopers outfitted in full riot gear joined them.

Although negotiations continue, national solidarity from the labor movement is urgently needed to aid the embattled workers.  
 
September 1, 1958
A Negro worker is waiting to die in Alabama’s electric chair on Sept. 5 for the alleged theft of $1.95. Protests, inquiries and appeals for mercy are pouring into the offices of Gov. Folsom of Alabama and President Eisenhower from a shocked international public. But whether they are sufficient or soon enough to stay the hands of the Alabama executioners remains to be seen.

Jimmy Wilson, a 55-year-old Negro handyman, was convicted July 27, 1957, of robbing Mrs. Estelle Barker, an 82-year-old white woman at her home near Marion.

At the trial it was charged that Wilson, unarmed, “took three 50-cent coins, one 25-cent coin and 20 one-cent coins of the United States” from the woman for whom he worked as a yardman. Under Alabama law, robbery is punishable by death.  
 
September 2, 1933
In tens and hundreds of thousands in various trades and industries throughout the country, the workers are streaming into the conservative labor organizations. A. F. of L. unions which in many cases were reduced to skeletons during the recent years are experiencing a stormy revival.

If we wish to keep a live contact with the masses, hasten their inevitable disillusionment with the grandiose swindle of the NRA [National Industrial Recovery Act] and steer them into great class battles we must march with this instinctive movement and influence it from within.

To stand aside from this living movement with its present direction and arbitrarily prescribe a different path would only mean to rob the mass movement of its dynamic revolutionary nucleus.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home