January 24, 2000
BIRMINGHAM — “Farmers want to go to Atlanta because they haven’t received any debt relief or money, or have been outright turned down. They want justice,” said David Howard, a cotton and soy bean farmer from Mississippi, and president of the Mileston Cooperative.
Farmers and their supporters stepped up activities this week to build the Jan. 17 march in Atlanta. Black farmers in the rural area northeast of Memphis are fighting to get out the truth about a growing scandal. It involves the federal government’s actions around the March 1999 settlement of the lawsuit against discrimination by the United States Department of Agriculture.
The settlement — far from providing relief to Black farmers — has become part of perpetuating the long-standing discriminatory practices that over the years have driven tens of thousands of small Black farmers off the land.
January 24, 1975
The FBI maintains 160 agents in Puerto Rico whose sole function is to persecute the pro-independence movement on that island of 2.8 million people. This was among the facts revealed by a former FBI employee at a news conference in San Juan.
One of the methods employed by the FBI is to send agents into pro-independence organizations. Other FBI techniques included illegal mail tampering. Sometimes the FBI would return the letters to the postal system for delivery, but in other cases the intercepted communications would be put in FBI files. The FBI also obtained copies of bank records of pro-independence groups.
The latest information about the FBI’s activities comes in the wake of a stepped-up campaign of harassment of pro-independence militants related to the recently concluded strike at the Aqueducts and Sewers Authority.
January 23, 1950
[President] Truman has given the green light to invoke a Taft-Hartley injunction against the embattled coal miners, some 90,000 of whom last week decided not to discontinue their “rolling” strike begun Jan. 9.
This move brings out into the open the conspiracy of the coal operators and the government to put legal shackles on the miners and deal them a crushing defeat. Then the way will be cleared, Big Business thinks, to “deal with” the other unions, particularly the CIO.
The whole capitalist class and government, including Truman, have launched a concerted assault upon a vital sector of the labor movement. The entire organized working class must be mobilized to back the miners, to send them finances and relief, to hold mass meetings and pass resolutions telling Truman, Congress and the courts: “Hands off the miners!”