Vol. 81/No. 9      March 6, 2017

 

25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

 

March 6, 1992

Flight attendants at Nationair, Canada’s largest charter airline, voted in Montreal and Toronto February 2 to step up their fight for a new contract. Four hundred and fifty attendants in the two cities, members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, have been locked out by the company since November 19.

Attendants earn an average of $15,600 per year. They are fighting for a wage increase, minimum daily pay, more rights over scheduling and schedule changes, and other benefits.

Many flight attendants hold down two jobs or live with their parents. A majority are under 30 years old.

Sitting in the section of the flight lounge, Anne Boulet and Nathalie Dussault, both members of the union’s public relations committee, explained how flight attendants can end up working 20 hours at a stretch on round-trip flights, reducing customer service and safety.

March 6, 1967

The Ku Klux Klan has taken another victim in Natchez, Miss. Wharlest Jackson, former treasurer of the Natchez NAACP, was killed when a bomb exploded in his truck as he was leaving his job at the Armstrong Cork plant Feb. 27.

Jackson had just been promoted to a paint mixing job previously done only by whites. Two years ago, George Metcalf, local president of the NAACP, was crippled by a bomb explosion in his car as he was leaving the Armstrong plant where he is also employed. The plant has been notorious for its concentration of Klansmen.

Charles Evers, NAACP state field secretary, said that Jackson’s death made a total of 41 killings of Negroes in the state since his brother Medgar was gunned down three years ago.

The FBI announced it is probing Jackson’s death. Black people of Mississippi will do well to look to their own resources for defense against the Klan.

March 7, 1942

The indiscriminate and brutal witch-hunt being conducted against non-citizens born in countries at war with the United States is now being directed at naturalized citizens and native-born Americans whose ancestry is Japanese, German and Italian.

The move, having the character of a racial pogrom, was initiated Feb. 20 by an executive order from President Roosevelt, giving the War Department and the Army the power to arbitrarily remove any person, citizen as well as alien, from his home and exclude him from any area which the Army may designate as a military area.

The immediate purpose of this order is to permit the Army and the FBI to remove West Coast residents of Japanese descent.

Although the order does not constitute the establishment of martial law, those citizens affected by an Army order will in effect have no recourse to civil justice.  
 
 
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