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Vol. 74/No. 43      November 15, 2010

 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
November 15, 1985
NEW YORK—The cover-up of the racist cop murder of Michael Stewart is unraveling in a courtroom here. As the trial of six transit cops charged with criminally negligent homicide, assault, and perjury enters its eighth week, the extent of the cover-up—reaching beyond the cops to the district attorney, the chief medical examiner, and possibly the mayor—is being demonstrated.

Stewart, a Black man, 25, was arrested by transit cops in September 1983 for allegedly drawing graffiti on a subway station wall. After his arrest, Stewart was taken from the subway to a nearby street and beaten by the cops.

The cover-up began within hours of the murder when Chief Medical Examiner Elliot Gross issued an autopsy report that claimed Stewart had died of spontaneous cardiac arrest. Protests by the Stewart family and others compelled Gross to issue a new autopsy report.  
 
November 14, 1960
Nov. 8—As the “great debate” between Kennedy and Nixon drew to its dreary close it became evident that the two candidates of big business had made one contribution to truth. Their controversy over which had the best program for smashing the Cuban Revolution provoked well-informed sources to reveal some of the facts about Washington’s plans to overthrow the Cuban government the way it had the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954.

When Cuban Foreign Minister Raul Roa informed the United Nations that the U.S. was plotting Guatemala-style military aggression against his country, U.S. spokesman James Wadsworth piously declared that the charges were “monstrous distortions and downright falsehoods.” But as various newspaper partisans of Nixon and Kennedy set out to prove that one or the other was wrong in his handling of the Cuban issue they proceeded to spill the beans.  
 
November 16, 1935
MINNEAPOLIS, Nov. 8—The offensive of the old time, reactionary craft-union A. F. of L. bureaucrats against the progressive, militant leadership of the general drivers union, Local 574, was met this evening by a mass meeting in which the machinations of Meyer Lewis, personal representative of William Green, were exposed. The mass meeting, held in Local 574’s hall, was attended by almost four thousand workers and was addressed by numerous leaders in the labor movement.

The chairman of the meeting, Bill Brown, president of the union, opened the meeting by declaring that Green-Lewis and Company had formed a “united front with the Citizens Alliance in order to break up everything 574 had gained for its members. Lewis says that Minneapolis is the worst spot in the United States. It is—for Citizens Alliances. But it is now the best place for workers.”  
 
 
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