Vol. 75/No. 38      October 24, 2011

October 24, 1986
Workers at Delta Catfish Processors, Inc., in Indianola, Mississippi, voted by a 58 percent majority October 10 to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union. The vote marked a victory for an organizing drive that faced a well-financed campaign of intimidation by the company.

Delta Catfish is the largest employer in Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta. Each day the 1,050 workers kill, fillet, and freeze some 400,000 pounds of catfish raised on farms in the region.

Ninety percent of the workers are Black. Their pay averages $3.90 an hour—and when the supply of fish runs out they must often punch out and wait without pay for another truckload.

Mississippi, with only 9 percent of its workers belonging to unions, is one of the least unionized states in the country.  
 
October 23, 1961
A fourth victim of the Monroe, North Carolina, “kidnap” frame-up has been arrested. FBI agents on Oct. 12 seized Mrs. Willie Mae Mallory in a private home in Cleveland, Ohio, where police had maintained a “stakeout.” The 34-year-old Afro-American woman was taken without a struggle though the FBI wanted circulars had listed and described her as “dangerous” and said she was likely to be carrying a concealed revolver.

Well known as a militant fighter for civil rights, she is a friend of Robert F. Williams, the Monroe Negro leader who, after eluding the FBI on the same “kidnap” frame-up, has been granted political asylum in Cuba. A supporter of Williams’ newsletter, The Crusader, she had several times gone to Monroe to assist him with its publication.  
 
December 26, 1936
Within several weeks the 75th Congress will be in session. Those workers who supported Roosevelt and the Democratic party in the recent election are due for a rude awakening.

Now that the election is safely over and labor’s votes no longer needed, Roosevelt is showing his true colors. The drastic slash in the W.P.A. rolls is a case in point. Pious speeches on peace are indeed made in South America, but at the same time new war vessels are launched and authorized at home.

Labor’s hopes of legislative gains are dimmed by Roosevelt’s growing beliefs that recovery has already taken place, and that prosperity is now at hand. For those who accept those beliefs, there is no further need of emergency measures, regardless of the presence of 10,000,000 unemployed.  
 
 
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