Vol. 74/No. 13      April 5, 2010

Nineteen Blacks were slaughtered in Langa township March 21 by South African cops while participating in a peaceful funeral procession. The racist regime claimed that a crowd of 4,000 people attacked the cops with stones, sticks, and firebombs. But eyewitness accounts report that the crowd had dwindled to 300 to 500 people when the cops opened fire.

This murderous assault raised the official death total for the last 13 months to 243, all Blacks except one.

In the typical arrogance of an imperialist slavemaster, President Reagan told a White House news conference that the Blacks themselves may have provoked the cops, and thus caused their own deaths.  
 
April 4, 1960
March 30—As a result of two successive sit-in actions and mass demonstrations by 5,000 Negro students in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the lunch-counter protest movement now includes every Southern state except Mississippi.

The Louisiana students joined the southwide movement as integration victories were won in several areas and as police stepped up the campaign of jailings.

Seven students from Louisiana’s all-Negro Southern University were jailed Monday for demanding service at Jim Crow lunch counters. The next day nine more were jailed as the anti-segregation action was repeated.

This afternoon an estimated 3,000 students massed on the steps of the state capitol in Baton Rouge to protest the arrests. Another 2,000 marched through the city carrying signs that proclaimed: “We refuse to be intimidated.”  
 
April 6, 1935
The conviction of eight leaders and active workers of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Union and consequent sentence to the penitentiary, is a crime of the first magnitude, not only against the individual victims but against the entire working class of America, against all forces in the country working for a better and happier future.

Those guilty of the Sacramento crime are, first of all, the industrialists and bankers of California, their cover organization, the Associated Farmers, and their agents, the prosecuting attorneys, the court, the vigilantes and deputies, the police and the hired stool pigeons—the whole state apparatus of repression and oppression.

Accomplices in the crime are the cynical and corrupt leaders of the Communist Party who shamefully subordinated the interests of the defendants to an internal party factional struggle against them.  
 
 
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