25, 50 and 75 Years Ago

March 2, 2020

March 6, 1995

PEORIA, Illinois — Members of United Auto Workers on strike against Caterpillar in central Illinois continue to voice their resolve to keep up the fight until they can go back with a contract and their union intact. While 20 to 30 percent of union members have crossed the picket line, the vast majority did so in the first month of the strike last June. Since then all of the company’s attempts to get large numbers of strikers to cross have failed.

“We’ll stay out as long as it takes,” said Charlie Holt, a Decatur striker.

“Cat is using union-busting tactics,” said Rick Vespa, a striker at the Mossville plant. “The two-tier is really a union-busting tactic, because it tries to divide the workforce between young and old, economically, physically and psychologically. It’s like psychological warfare.”

March 6, 1970

NEW YORK — Women’s liberation groups throughout the entire East Coast are helping to build the first mass demonstration on abortion in the history of the United States, to be held here March 28.

Around 45 women’s liberation groups in New York are helping organize the action. These include college and high school groups, as well as citywide organizations like Red Stockings and the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women.

The demonstration is also sponsored by Women’s Abortion Project, the 350 plaintiffs in a suit to have the New York State abortion law declared unconstitutional. One of the purposes is to show through mass action the extent of the support for this suit.

There are signs that the action is catching on outside New York City.

March 3, 1945

Vigilante violence, overtly encouraged by the capitalist press and slyly winked at by the local authorities, raised its head in California last week to endanger the lives of Japanese-Americans returning to the West Coast from inland concentration camps into which they were thrust shortly after America’s entry into the [second world] war.

For three years thousands of people against whom no crime has ever been alleged have been forcibly deprived of their civil rights, kept prisoners in stockades. The farms and homes of many of them went under the auctioneer’s hammer. Those who managed to hold on to their farms and homes and are presently returning are now becoming victims of a campaign of intimidation and violence organized by the self-same reactionary business interests and their vigilante hirelings.