On this day in 1897, the Lattimer Massacre occurred near Hazelton, Pennsylvania when a Sheriff's posse fired into a crowd of unarmed, striking miners, killing 19. Miners, mostly Eastern European immigrants, had been protesting for better pay and union recognition.
A week prior, over 3,000 miners had gone on strike, demanding better pay and an end to the forced use of the company store. On the morning of September 10th, approximately 400 miners peacefully marched to a newly opened coal mine in Lattimer to support a new United Mine Workers (UMW) union there.
After refusing an order to disperse by a Luzerne County sheriff's posse, the posse fired into the crowd. Nineteen miners were killed and several dozen were wounded.
Despite the fact that sheriffs had been overhead joking about how many strikers they would kill that morning, as well as medical evidence that demonstrated miners were mostly shot in the back, the sheriff and seventy-three deputies were acquitted at trial, insisting that they were charged by the crowd.
The massacre was a turning point in the history of the United Mine Workers (UMW), who received more than 10,000 new members in the aftermath of the massacre.
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The psych ward is awful and the most depressing place on earth. How're you supposed to tell people how you're actually doing when you know that's just what's gonna end up happening to you
I know! I hated doing it during nursing school, I got so pissed at the staff about controlling smoking times and I definitely identified more with the patients - they said I was having emotion transfer which a lot of people get, but I just felt so angry about the whole thing and it was one of the first times I like broke down crying in public. I really don't like the whole design of psych units, at this point straight abolition would be better but it would also hurt a lot of people to just have NO CARE on the outside. We definitely need better alternative institutions in things like mental healthcare very desperately. I like the early psychosis intervention model but that doesn't cover everyone obviously. There's also this town in Belgium that has had its residents like take in people who need care, they don't place family with family, and it's been a thing for like 600 years - that sounds appealing but it would be hard to implement anywhere else, like if you move their you know you may be asked to do that because they've been doing it since the middle ages, and it's hard to imagine individualist USians agreeing to anything like that