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Vol. 75/No. 36      October 10, 2011

 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
October 10, 1986
“We’re on a strike that now includes 30 percent of the state’s dairy farmers. We need more to survive. What we ask for is a doubling of the price paid us for our milk. There is no surplus of milk, it’s just not distributed evenly.”

So testified Jo Bates, a dairy farmer for 23 years from Greenwich, New York, speaking before hearings of the New York Legislative Commission on Dairy Industry Development.

The commission was formed by the legislature to review the situation in the state’s dairy industry, where disastrously low prices to producers have spurred a growing number of farmers to go on strike and begin dumping out their milk in an effort to raise the price.

It costs a New York dairy farmer $1.50 to produce a gallon of milk, for which the farmer is paid only 75 cents.  
 
October 9, 1961
Cuba’s Revolutionary Government on Oct. 3 announced that it was granting political asylum to Robert F. Williams, North Carolina Negro leader. Williams, who was indicted on frame-up kidnap charges following white-supremacist rioting against Freedom Riders and Negroes in Monroe, N.C., on Aug. 27, had been the object of a FBI manhunt covering the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

In granting a haven of safety to Williams, the Cuban government stated that a paramount consideration was the fact that Negroes “are mistreated and persecuted as animals” in the U.S.

The FBI Wanted Circular for Williams contained false and inciting information calculated to encourage police officers encountering him to shoot on sight.  
 
December 12, 1936
Columns of the daily press are being given over to the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace now in session at Buenos Aires. The implication is that history is being written, civilization is on the march, the Roosevelt smile and the doctrine of “the good neighbor” have triumphed over the Forces of Darkness, and that all is for the best in the best of all possible Pan-American worlds.

What has really happened, of course, is that the Latin American countries have, in the words of Hubert Herring, New York Times correspondent, “lost faith in the League of Nations as the bulwark for weak people.” The answer is a new and smaller edition of the Thieves Kitchen now under way in the form of the seventh Pan-American conference.  
 
 
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