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Today in Labor History August 7, 1971: Jonathan Jackson, aged 17, brother of imprisoned Black Panther George Jackson, raided a Marin County, CA courtroom with an automatic weapon, and freed prisoners James McClain, William A. Christmas and Ruchell Magee. He took a judge, Deputy DA, and three jurors hostage. He demanded the release of the "Soledad Brothers," including his brother. Police killed 3 of the hostages as they attempted to drive away from the courthouse, as well as Jonathan Jackson and the freed inmates. Angela Davis, who owned the weapons used by Jackson, was jailed for 2 years, but was later acquitted of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. Prior to the escape attempt, Davis had organized a defense committee for the Soledad Brothers which included Noam Chomsky, Pete Seeger, Marlon Brando, Jame Fonda, the scientist Linus Pauling, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg.

In 1970, George Jackson had published his book, “Soledad Brother,” a collection of his prison writings from the 1960s, including numerous letters he had written to his then kid brother Jonathan. He also wrote critically about racism and white supremacy, class, and the brutality of the prison system. The Soledad brothers were George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, accused of murdering a prison guard at Soledad Prison, in California, in retaliation for the murder of three black inmates by prison guards three days prior. Clutchette and Drumgo were later acquitted. Jackson never got his day in court. He was murdered by prison guards, at San Quinten Prison, California, before his trial, exactly two weeks after his brother’s murder in the botched escape attempt. George Jackson had originally been imprisoned for the crime of stealing $70 from a gas station in 1961.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #georgejackson #angeladavis #blackpanthers #soledadbrothers #riot #sanquinten #prison #murder #police #policeabuse #conspiracy #racism #books #writer #author @bookstadon

Today in Labor History August 7, 1890: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was born in Concord, New Hampshire. Flynn joined the IWW in 1907, two years after its formation, and quickly became one of their best organizers. She was instrumental in the Patterson Silk Strike (1913). In 1909, during the Spokane Free Speech fight, she chained herself to a lamp post to delay her arrest. Jess Waters portrayed her role in the Spokane struggle in his 2020 novel, “The Cold Millions.” John Updike also fictionalized her in his book, “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” (1996).

Flynn was a socialist early in her life, but later joined the Communist Party USA, rising to its chair in 1961. She was also a founding member of the ACLU, where she played an important role in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. Additionally, she was a feminist activist, fighting for birth control rights and women’s suffrage. In 1934, despite her poor health, she actively supported the West Coast Longshore Strike. She was also a prolific writer, including the 1916 book, “Sabotage: the Conscious Withdrawal of Workers Efficiency.” The famous IWW bard, Joe Hill, wrote the song “Rebel Girl” (1915) for Flynn, and the photograph of a woman, holding a red flag, on the cover of the sheet music, bears a striking resemblance to Flynn.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #eliazabethgurleyflynn #IWW #union #organizing #strike #sabotage #communism #socialism #anarchism #aclu #writer #author #books #fiction #novels @bookstadon

Today in History August 6, 1945: The B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, immediately killing 70,000 children, women and male civilians. Tens of thousands more died in subsequent decades from radiation-induced illnesses. Nagasaki got the same two days later. However, today’s nuclear weapons are far more powerful and the U.S. has 5,800 of them, enough to obliterate the planet several times over. Russia has 6,375, and China has 320. And let’s not forget Israel’s nukes, as they draw the U.S. closer to putting boots on the ground in Iran. Or India and Pakistan’s, as shooting skirmishes flare up every few years in Kahsmir. Or North Korea’s. Or France’s and UK’s.

Oh, we will all char together when we char
And let there be no moaning of the bar
Just sing out a tedium when you see that I-C-B-M
And the party will be "come as you are”

RIP Tom Lehrer

Old Bisbee jail: 2 story brick building with iron bars on the window.

Local IWW headquarters used to be next door (now an empty lot). I asked local historian, and IWW fellow worker, Mike Anderson about it. He said yeh, the location was weird, but the town was incredibly dense (20,000 people squeezed into a few city blocks), and you rented where you could.

During the 1917 strike and deportation, many Wobblies (IWW members) were arrested and jailed here. During more recent restorations, after removing old plaster, they discovered IWW graffiti on the walls.

Many of the men who were kidnapped and deported were taken to Columbus, New Mexico, where Pancho Villa had invaded just the year before (in one of the only times a foreign army invaded US mainland since the War of 1812). They no doubt were hoping that the US army, which was still there, would brutralize the men.

Video as we drive past the tailings of the old Lavender Pit Copper Mine, in operation from 1950-1974. Owned by Phelps Dodge, located between Lowell and Bisbee, Arizona, site of the infamous 1917 kidnapping and deportation of striking IWW copper miners, on the orders of the Phelps Dodge management.

#IWW#copper#mining

Photo of me in Lowell, Arizona, outside a hat shop, with antique cars on the side of the road, and an old Indian Motorcycles shop.

Now aghost town, Lowell was incorporated into Bisbee, AZ, in 2908. It was settled by Copper miners from Serbia, Finland Montenegro.

July 12, 1917, 1,300 striking IWW copper miners and their supporters were kidnapped from Bisbee, by vigilantes to crush the union. They were forced into cattle cars and illegally deported 200 miles into New Mexico, through desert, without any food or water.

Today in Labor History August 1, 1938: Police opened fire on 200 unarmed trade unionists protesting the unloading of a ship in Hilo Harbor, on the Big Island of Hawaii, in what became known as "the Hilo Massacre." The protest was in support of striking waterfront workers. 50 workers were injured. Police also used tear gas and bayonets. The workers came from numerous ethnic backgrounds, including Japanese, Chinese, Native Hawaiian, Luso (Portuguese) and Filipino. They belonged to several unions, including the ILWU. They were fighting for equal pay to dockers on the U.S. west coast and for a closed, union shop. Harry Kamoku (depicted in the original woodblock poster shown in this post) was the primary organizer and leader of the strike, as well as a member of Hawaii’s first union to be legally recognized. He was a Chinese-Hawaiian, a longshoreman, born in Hilo.

Today in Labor History August 1, 1921: Sheriff Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers were murdered by Baldwin-Felts private cops. They did it in retaliation for Hatfield’s role in the Matewan labor battle in 1920, when two Felts family thugs were killed by Hatfield and his deputies. Sheriff Hatfield had sided with the coal miners during their strike. The private cops executed Hatfield and Chambers on the Welch County courthouse steps in front of their wives. This led to the Battle of Blair Mountain, where 20,000 coal miners marched to the anti-union stronghold Logan County to overthrow Sheriff Dan Chaffin, the coal company tyrant who murdered miners with impunity. The Battle of Blair Mountain started in September 1921. The armed miners battled 3,000 police, private cops and vigilantes, who were backed by the coal bosses. It was the largest labor uprising in U.S. history, and the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. The president of the U.S. eventually sent in 27,000 national guards. Over 1 million rounds were fired. Up to 100 miners were killed, along with 10-30 Baldwin-Felts detectives and 3 national guards. They even dropped bombs on the miners from planes, the second time in history that the U.S. bombed its own citizens (the first being the pogrom against black residents of Tulsa, earlier that same year).

Several novels portray the Battle of Blair Mountain, including Storming Heaven, by Denise Giardina, (1987), Blair Mountain, by Jonathan Lynn (2006), and Carla Rising, by Topper Sherwood (2015). And one of my favorite films of all time, “Matewan,” by John Sayles (1987), portrays the Matewan Massacre and the strike leading up to it. The film has a fantastic soundtrack of Appalachian music from the period. And the great West Virginia bluegrass singer, Hazel Dickens, sings the title track, "Fire in the Hole." She also appears in the film as a member of the Freewill Baptist Church.

You can read my complete article on the Battle of Blair Mountain, and Matewan, here: michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #mining #westvirginia #strike #union #police #vigilantes #uprising #racism #riots #blackwallstreet #film #novel #books @bookstadon

Today in Labor History August 1, 1917: IWW organizer Frank Little was lynched in Butte, Montana. Little was a Cherokee miner and member of the IWW. He went to Butte during the Speculator Mine strike to help organize the miners. Little had previously helped organize oil workers, timber workers and migrant farm workers in California. He had participated in free speech fights in Missoula, Spokane and Fresno, and helped pioneer many of the passive resistance techniques later used by the Civil Rights movement. He was also an anti-war activist, calling U.S. soldiers “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniforms.” On August 1, 1917, vigilantes broke into the boarding house where he was staying. They dragged him through the streets while tied to the back of a car and then hanged him from a railroad trestle.

Author Dashiell Hammett had been working in Butte at the time as a strike breaker for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. They had tried to get him to murder Little, offering him $5,000, but he refused. He later wrote about the experience in his novel, “Red Harvest.” It supposedly haunted him throughout his life that anyone would think he would do such a thing. He was also investigated by the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) because of his ties to socialism.

Read my complete biography of Little here: michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/
Read my complete article on the Pinkertons here: michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/
Read my bio of Dashiell Hammett here: michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #IWW #union #strike #racism #indigenous #immigration #mining #freespeech #civildisobedience #civilrights #antiwar #author #books #fiction #writer #novel @bookstadon

Today in Labor History July 31, 1968: Students protested the Olympics in Mexico City. They occupied schools and began a General Strike. Cops violently attacked them. The violence culminated with the Tlatelolco massacre, October 2, during which the cops slaughtered 350-400 people, using snipers. They arrested and tortured over 1,300.

Alejandro Jodorowsky dramatized the massacre in his surreal film, “The Holy Mountain” (1973). In it, he showed birds, fruits, vegetables and other things falling and being ripped out of the wounds of the dying students. The late author, Roberto Bolaño, recounted the massacre in his novel “Amulet” (1999). He also retells the story in his novel, “The Savage Detectives.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #students #olympics #mexico #protest #massacre #tlatelolco #generalstrike #police #policebrutality #policemurder #robertobolaño #film #author #books #fiction #novel #writer @bookstadon

Today in Labor History July 31, 1922: A General Strike against Fascism began in Italy, running from July 31 to August 2. Socialists led the strike, which the fascists defeated. Rudolph Rocker, an Anarcho-Syndicalist of the period, said: "… the democratic government armed the Fascist hordes and throttled this last attempt at the defense of freedom and right. But Italian democracy had dug its own grave. It thought it could use Mussolini as a tool against the workers, but thus it became its own grave-digger." In October, 1922, the fascists led a march through Rome, which ultimately led to a coup and their ascension to power. During the march, Mussolini was in Milan, supposedly with a ticket for an ocean liner to flee the country should the fascists fail in the coup.

Today in Labor History July 30, 2006: Murray Bookchin died. He was an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, social theorist, libertarian socialist, and founder of social ecology. He published over two dozen books. In the 1990s, disillusioned by the increasingly “apolitical, lifestylism” of mainstream anarchism, he stopped calling himself an anarchist and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology that he called “communalism,” which sought to combine elements of Marxism and anarchosyndicalism. His ideas, more generally, have influenced numerous movements, including the New Left, anti-nuclear, Occupy Wall Street, and the People Defense Units (YPG) and the Rojava Kurdish Autonomous Region of Syria. In 1988, along with Howie Hawkins, he cofounded the Left-Green Network, as a radical alternative to the liberal Greens, with a focus on Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism. His critique of Deep Ecology, popular among many in the radical Earth First! Movement, led many Earth Firsters to refer to him as Bernie Munchkin. He rejected the popular view of Barry Commoner and Paul Ehrlich that the environmental crisis was caused by technology or overpopulation, or human nature, but was rather the product of capitalism, its “grow or die imperative,” and its emphasis on profit or human life and security.

Today in Labor History July 30, 1866: Police shot into a group of recently freed black workers outside the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans, in the wake of the Civil War. This was the site of a reconvened Louisiana Constitutional Convention. A crowd of whites then stormed the hall. By the time federal troops restored order, 38 were dead and 136 wounded — almost all of them black. The mob was made up of recently defeated Confederate soldiers. National outrage at the New Orleans Massacre, and the Memphis Riots in May, helped the Radical Republicans win a majority in both houses of Congress and catalyzed support for passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the Reconstruction Act, authorizing military occupation of the South.

Today in Labor History July 30, 1676: Nathaniel Bacon issued the "Declaration of the People of Virginia," beginning Bacon's Rebellion, an armed insurrection against the rule of Governor William Berkeley. It was the first insurrection in the American colonies and the first class uprising in North America. Thousands of indentured white Europeans united with free, indentured, and enslaved black people to demand rights and privileges they were being denied. They took up arms and drove Berkeley from Jamestown, burning the colonial capital to the ground. It took several years for the authorities to put down all the pockets of resistance. Bacon died of dysentery. However, Berkeley executed 23 of his followers. King Charles, disillusioned with Berkeley’s rule, recalled him to England. The king said "That old fool has put to death more people in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father."

The unification of poor blacks and whites scared the hell out of the ruling class. Consequently, they realized they needed to sow divisions between the poor, so they would fight among each other rather than unify in another uprising against the rich. This led to a hardening of the color lines and the development of the ideas of race and racial superiority. The ruling elite used the uprising to justify passage of the Virginia slave code of 1705 and many of the first laws that distinguished between black and white people. They shifted from their reliance on indentured white servitude to chattel slavery, and bestowed new status and privileges on poor and formerly indentured whites. Further, they used the uprising, and Bacon’s own hatred of Native Americans, to unify all white farmers, large and small, against the Indigenous peoples.

Today in Labor History July 29, 1962: British aristocrat and fascist leader, Oswald Mosely, was beaten by antifascists in London’s east end. Even after police began to escort him away, activists from the antifascist 62 Group (AKA 62 Committee), led by Jewish, communist, and black activists, were able to pelt him with eggs, fruit and rocks. He later called a rally, which the activists successfully disrupted with shouts of “down with fascists.” The only people arrested were antifascist activists.

62 Group disrupted fascist meetings throughout the early to mid-60s, beating up or attacking fascists whenever they had the chance, much like the Jewish antifascist 43 Group did in the 1940s. As a result, they were able to significantly reduce the power and effectiveness of the fascists in the 1960s.

Mosely had been a Labor MP and junior minister from 1918-1931. As the leader of the British Union of Fascists, publicly supported antisemitism and tried to form alliances with Mussolini and Hitler. During the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, antifascist demonstrators including unions, anarchists, socialists, communists, liberals and Jews, prevented the BUF from marching through the East End of London. During World War Two, Moseley and his wife were imprisoned as threats to the national security.

Mosely is portrayed in numerous works of fiction, including the television series, The Peaky Blinders. He is portrayed in Pink Floyd’s the wall; Aldous Huxley’s 1928 novel, Point Counter Point; HG Wells's 1939 novel The Holy Terror; PG Wodehouse's Jeeves series; and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #oswaldmosely #fascism #antifascism #london #antisemitism #anarchism #communism #socialism #racism #books #novel #author #writer #fiction @bookstadon

Today in Labor History July 29, 1903: The first delegation from Mother Jones’ March of the Mill Children arrived at Teddy Roosevelt's summer home in Oyster Bay, Long Island. They went there to publicize the harsh conditions of child labor. Roosevelt wouldn’t allow them through the gates. In 1901, the millworkers in Pennsylvania went on strike. Many were young women and girls, demanding to be paid adult wages. At the time, fully one in every six American children was employed, generally at extremely low pay and often under dangerous conditions. Many of the kids had lost fingers or limbs. Mother Jones would go on to cofound the IWW, in 1905.

The march started in Philadelphia, on July 7. During the march, Mother Jones gave her famous “Wail of the Children” speech, which included the following lines:

“After a long and weary march… we are on our way to see President Roosevelt at Oyster Bay. We will ask him to recommend the passage of a bill by congress to protect children against the greed of the manufacturer. We want him to hear the wail of the children, who never have a chance to go to school, but work from ten to eleven hours a day in the textile mills of Philadelphia, weaving the carpets that he and you walk on, and the curtains and clothes of the people. In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills, they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone? The trouble is that the fellers in Washington don’t care. I saw them last winter pass three railroad bills in one hour, but when labor cries for aid for the little ones they turn their backs and will not listen to her. I asked a man in prison once how he happened to get there. He had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him that if he had stolen a railroad, he could be a United States Senator.”

In her autobiography, Mother Jones wrote the following about the march: “Every day little children came into Union Headquarters, some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle. They were stooped things, round shouldered and skinny. Many of them were not over ten years of age, the state law prohibited their working before they were twelve years of age.

It wasn’t just in mills, either. Children worked on farms, in factories, as servants in rich people’s homes, pretty much anywhere where they could do the work. They were often chosen over adults because they could be paid much less, and were less likely to demand rights, or to organize a strike. They could also do things with their small hands that adults were often less able to do well, particularly dangerous things, like unclogging gears and conveyor belts. I portray this in my novel, ANYWHERE BUT SCHUYLKILL. My protagonist, Mike Doyle, starts work in the coal breaker at age 12. However, many boys worked in breakers as young as 6. And many of them were missing fingers or hands. Many died young, too, from accidents.

You can get a copy from these indie retailers:
keplers.com/
greenapplebooks.com/

Or send me $25 via Venmo (@Michael-Dunn-565) and your mailing address, and I will send you a signed copy!

#workingclass #LaborHistory #childlabor #exploitation #children #motherjones #march #protest #pennsylvania #IWW #strike #union #mikedoyle #anywherebutschuylkill #books #fiction #historicalfiction #author #writer #novel @bookstadon