Vol. 77/No. 39 November 4, 2013
November 4, 1988
ST GEORGE’S, Grenada — Youth began gathering at a corner of the market square here on October 19. The rally was organized by the Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement to commemorate the assassination of Bishop.Bishop and other leaders of Grenada’s revolutionary government were gunned down by troops loyal to Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard five years ago.
A few days before the killings, Coard staged a counterrevolutionary coup that toppled Grenada’s revolutionary government, which had been in power since 1979. On Oct. 25, 1983, U.S. troops invaded the island, installing a proimperialist government that today is headed by Herbert Blaize.
Unable to ignore the high esteem in which Bishop is held by the Grenadian people, Blaize’s government was forced to organize a token ceremony of its own on October 19 and to call for a National Day of Prayer.
November 4, 1963
CHICAGO — Tuesday, Oct. 22, was “Freedom Day” in Chicago. It was the day of the biggest civil-rights boycott in the nation’s history. Almost 200,000 elementary and high school students stayed away from classes. The students, mostly Negroes from the ghettoes of the South Side and West Side, were protesting the re-hiring of School Superintendent Benjamin Willis.He had resigned under fire from his $48,000-a-year job as czar of the Chicago school system after stubbornly resisting school desegregation demands. But the school board (appointed by Democratic Mayor Daley) refused to accept his resignation. Boycott actions are being proposed to win Willis’ ouster.
School teachers and Willis himself admitted that the boycott constituted a nearly unanimous show of strength. Students pasted “Freedom Day” stickers on walls, windows and lockers in their schools and neighborhoods.
November 5, 1938
Nearly 1,500 crowded into the Center Hotel in New York City Friday to celebrate the founding of the Fourth International and the tenth anniversary of our movement in this country.Leon Trotsky addressed the meeting by electrical transcription. He reviewed the history of the movement that has come to fruition in the newly-founded International and reiterated its historic task, “the full material and spiritual liberation of the toilers and exploited through the socialist revolution.”
Trotsky’s speech was the climax of a meeting that dramatically symbolized the struggles, the sacrifices, the traditions, hopes, and convictions of the movement that has now entered the most fruitful period of its development under the unfurled banner of the Fourth International. Others who spoke represented the currents that merged with the Left Opposition and are fused under the banner of the Socialist Workers Party.
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