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Vol. 78/No. 28      August 4, 2014

 
25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

August 4, 1989

Faced with a new stage in Eastern Airlines’ plans to restart operations, striking Machinists, flight attendants, and pilots are looking for ways to broaden labor support in an effort to maintain the impact of their strike.

Responding to Eastern’s start-up of additional flights August 1, strikers in some cities have won backing from other unions and central labor bodies for rallies and expanded pickets.

The resumption of flights — with enough passengers on them to make money — is central to Eastern’s plan to break the strike and resume flying as a smaller, nonunion carrier.

July 27, 1964

Mrs. Barbara Barksdale, a 23-year-old Negro mother, on her way home from a relative’s apartment in Harlem the night of July 18-19, found herself near the fighting at the corner of Lenox Ave. and 128th St.

Not wishing to become involved, she looked for a cop to help her flag a taxi. A cop came at her with a drawn gun, took careful aim and shot her in the groin.

“You shot me, you shot me,” she cried. The cop looked at her and said: “Well, lay down and die then.”

“That cop shot me intentionally,” she told reporters, “I think he was hating all of us Negroes when he did it.”

August 1, 1939

The campaign for a people’s referendum on war is launched. The Party Convention decided that we must transform ourselves into a CAMPAIGN PARTY OF ACTION AND AGITATION.

Just as a lens concentrates the sun’s rays into a burning shaft of heat, so we must focus the resources of our organization into a mass campaign around the slogan: “LET THE PEOPLE VOTE ON WAR!”

Between August 1 and September 15 — the duration of the campaign — we want to carry the slogan, and with it the anti-war message of the party, to at least 200,000 workers.  
 
 
 
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