August 28, 2000
NEW YORK — “CWA! CWA! CWA!” chanted a sea of 8,000 red-shirted strikers bearing banners and signs in a militant and spirited mobilization here outside the national headquarters of Verizon Communications August 10.
The show of force in New York has been backed up by hundreds of picket lines at Verizon facilities across 12 states and the District of Columbia. A total of 86,000 workers walked off the job August 6 after their contract expired.
“The main issues are job security, health benefit co-payments, working conditions, and organizing the wireless phone workers,” said Dexter Martin, a technician at Verizon for more than two years. Workers are also striking against the company’s attempt to subcontract work to outside companies.
September 5, 1975
On August 15, Joanne Little was found not guilty of second-degree murder in the slaying of her jailer Clarence Alligood.
Women identified with Little. The vicious abuse of Little, who was threatened by Alligood with an ice pick and forced to perform a sexual act, enraged women across the nation. The Black liberation movement knew that Little’s plight stemmed from her being Black and poor. For the men and women filling this country’s jails and prisons, Joanne Little’s fight became a cry against the inhumane treatment of prisoners.
These forces combined in demonstrations, rallies, and pickets, turning Little’s case into the most widely publicized defense case in years. It was that support that won her acquittal.
August 28, 1950
American imperialism is waging a barbaric war of utmost brutality against the whole Korean people. Wholesale atrocities are being committed upon civilians, without regard for age or sex. Combatants are murdered on the spot, many of them after frightful torture. These facts about Truman’s “police action” have emerged in a report by John Osborne, senior Time-Life correspondent in the Far East.
Osborne gives us sufficient affirmation that this is a civil and revolutionary war being waged by the whole populace. It is this fact that accounts for the “utmost savagery” with which the people are being treated by U.S. interventionist forces. The whole populace is against the foreign invader — an invader who must slay whoever crosses his path.