Vol. 74/No. 16      April 26, 2010

The indictment of the cop, Stephen Sullivan, who fired two shotgun blasts into Eleanor Bumpurs—blowing off her hand with the first shot, killing her with the second—by a Bronx grand jury led to a right-wing demonstration by cops in February.

Judge Vincent A. Vitale made his decision solely on information provided by the cops. They said the 66-year-old Bumpurs, who was in poor health, made “repeated threats” after they burst into her apartment. Sullivan said Bumpurs waved a large knife and he shot her to protect his fellow cops.

Mary Bumpurs, one of Eleanor Bumpurs’ seven children, told the press, “The judge and the police department are saying, ‘If you’re poor, if you’re Black, then there’s no justice.’”  
 
April 25, 1960
The State Department’s campaign against the Cuban Revolution is becoming more and more ominous. Not a day passes without an attack on the new government as “communist.” Castro’s statements are combed for phrases that can be presented as “anti-American ravings and rantings.” The Cuban press, which is freer than the American, is pictured as “muzzled.”

Scare stories are planted in the press to frighten American tourists from visiting Havana where the streets are more peaceful than those of New York. Big business has clamped down on Cuba’s credit. The right to purchase certain products in the U.S. is denied.

The purpose of this frenzied propaganda is plain. The State Department seeks to isolate the Cuban Revolution, to bury it under a mountain of lies, and then at a propitious moment to move in with force and violence as it did in Guatemala in 1954.  
 
April 27, 1935
TOLEDO, Ohio—The first militant thrust of the nation’s auto workers against the ramparts of the giant General Motors Corporation began here with the walk out of all of the 2,200 employees of the Chevrolet Motors Co. Toledo plant. Organized in the Automobile Workers Federal Labor Union, Local 18384, the Chevrolet workers marched out of the plant in a body and formed mass picket lines, which quickly succeeded in shutting the plant down cold.

Toledo’s auto workers, who set the tone and tempo for the great strike wave of 1934 in the Auto-Lite strike of last May, may again have the distinction of touching off the strike bomb-shell which will have national repercussion.

Militants who stood in the forefront of last year’s historic battle are playing an outstanding role in the strike, leading and organizing the pickets, arranging publicity, instilling militancy and discipline into the ranks and developing effective lines of mass strike strategy.  
 
 
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