Vol. 79/No. 19 May 25, 2015
May 25, 1990
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — The rise of a militant trade union movement in South Africa over the last decade is a central feature of the unfolding battle against apartheid. Union organizing drives, strike actions, and worker demonstrations are a central part of the growing revolutionary mobilizations here.Today, after years of hard-fought battles against the employers and the apartheid regime, strong trade unions exist in most industries. From a few tens of thousands in the mid-1970s, 1.5 million Black workers now belong to trade unions.
The nonracial Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) is the largest federation in the country.
May 24, 1965
WASHINGTON, D.C. — An audience of some 4,000 sat waiting for the main debate in the historic national teach-in on Vietnam here May 15, when it was announced from the podium that U.S. State Department spokesman McGeorge Bundy had backed out.A brief statement of “regret” from Bundy was read and the audience listened with subdued anger at the section which said: “Seven hundred faculty members have made a protest against our policy in Vietnam …those who are protesting are only a minority — indeed a small minority — of American teachers and students.”
There were far more than 700 protesting faculty members in the single audience in Washington.
May 25, 1940
France’s black colonial slaves are bearing the brunt of the first battles.R. Walter Merguson, war correspondent from the Pittsburgh Courier, Negro newspaper, cabled from Paris, May 13:
“Black soldiers from the African colonies of France were sped by motor through northwestern Luxembourg and eastern France to meet the oncoming German war machines.”
In other words, the blacks have pushed in to take the heaviest blows of the Nazi war machine at the peak of its strength.
In February there were already 320,000 Senegalese troops at the front, with a total of a million to come, out of a population of eighteen million in French West and Equatorial Africa.
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