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Norwegian Workers Association Raid (1851)

Mon Jul 07, 1851

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Image: Marcus Thrane photographed in Chicago in the 1870s [nbl.snl.no]


On this day in 1851, police raided the Norwegian Workers Association, seizing documents, suppressing their newspaper, and arresting five board members, including founder Marcus Thrane, who served seven years in prison. Between this and other anti-labor crackdowns, approximately 200 members were arrested.

This suppression took place in the context of a broader political struggle against the state which was spearheaded by the union. A year earlier, the Norwegian Workers Association had delivered a petition, signed by more than 13,000 people, to King Oscar II of Sweden, demanding equality before the law, military conscription to be extended to property owners, and universal suffrage. When the government dismissed the petition, the union began agitating for revolution.

The Workers Association was one of the first major labor movements in Norway. It was founded by Marcus Thrane in 1848, who was inspired by the ongoing revolution in France. The association grew rapidly through 1849 and 1850.

At its peak, the group boasted 273 chapters and 25,000-30,000 members. Following the crackdown and Thrane's imprisonment, the movement collapsed.


 

Grabow Riot (1912)

Sun Jul 07, 1912

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Image: Imprisoned union workers following the Grabow Riot of 7th July, 1912. [libcom.org]


On this day in 1912, a riot broke out in Grabow, Louisiana when gunfire was exchanged between organizing lumber workers and private gunmen hired by the Galloway Lumber Company, just one event in the Louisiana-Texas Lumber War. The clash left three union workers and one company gunman dead, wounding an estimated fifty more.

The event took place in the context of workers in the sawmill town of Grabow joining the Brotherhood of Timber Workers (shown), a branch of the Lumber Workers Industrial Union (LWIU), itself affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

On July 7th, 1912, the union workers held a series of rallies at several different company towns, including Bon Ami and Carson, alongside Grabow.

The group that went to Grabow, around 200 people, spontaneously decided to hold a rally with several speeches - labor leader Arthur L. Emerson spoke on top of a wagon to roughly 25 non-union men, plus the additional union men who had come with him.

Shots began between these workers and a group of four others, including Galloway Lumber owner John Galloway, in the local mill office, all of whom had later been found to be drinking before the incident. It is not known for certain which group fired first. Three union men were killed alongside one member of the private company security force. Approximately 50 more were wounded.

Over the next few days, more than more than 60 workers were taken into custody by police. Although the mill owner himself was arrested, he was released without charges soon afterward. Sixty-five of the timber workers' group were brought up on charges ranging from inciting a riot to murder.

The IWW worked to aid the incarcerated workers, with "Big Bill" Haywood fundraising for their legal fund. The trial lasted until November 8th, and its jury returned a not guilty verdict for all of the union men. All of those arrested were set free.

Although they had limited success in Louisiana, the LWIU successfully organized later, winning an eight-hour day and vastly improved working conditions in the Pacific Northwest after a 1917 strike. Today, there is a historical marker at the site of the riot, located on what is now the property of DeRidder Airport, Louisiana.


 

Wagner Act (1935)

Sat Jul 06, 1935

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The National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act) is a U.S. labor law that became effective on this day in 1935, guaranteeing the right of private sector employees to organize trade unions, engage in collective bargaining, and strike.

The Act also set up a permanent three-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with the power to hear and resolve labor disputes through quasi-judicial proceedings and banned employers from refusing to negotiate with any union ratified by this board.

The Act does not apply to certain workers, including agricultural employees, domestic workers, government employees, and independent contractors. Despite demands by the NAACP and National Urban League, the Act was written without the inclusion of an anti-discrimination clause, allowing both employers and racist labor unions such as the AFL and CIO to maintain white supremacist labor practices.

Corporate interest was heavily against the NLRA, and, when it was challenged in court, the U.S. Supreme Court was compelled to uphold (5-4) the constitutionality of the Wagner Act in "National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp".

The Wagner Act would later be partially repealed and amended with the strongly anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, granting states the power to pass so-called "right-to-work" laws.


 

Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954)

Sat Jul 06, 1907

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Frida Kahlo, born on this day in 1907, was a Mexican artist and revolutionary communist known for her folk-art inspired style paintings, touching on themes on gender, race, class, self-perception, indigenous culture, and chronic pain.

Although she had always sketched as a hobby, she did not consider visual art as a career until a severe bus accident at the age of eighteen left her bedridden for three months and with a lifetime of chronic pain. Confined to her bed, Kahlo's mother provided her with a specially-made easel, which enabled her to paint while lying down.

With a mirror placed such so that she could see herself, Kahlo began to paint self-portraits, stating "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best".

Inspired by Mexico's popular culture, she employed an accessible, folk art style. In 1943, Kahlo accepted a teaching position at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, the "La Esmeralda." She encouraged her students to treat her in an informal and non-hierarchical way and taught them to appreciate Mexican popular culture and folk art, and to derive their subjects from the street.

Frida Kahlo was a member of the Mexican Communist Party and committed to radical anti-capitalism throughout her entire adult life. In 1951, she stated:

"I have a great restlessness about my paintings. Mainly because I want to make it useful to the revolutionary communist movement...until now I have managed simply an honest expression of my own self...I must struggle with all my strength to ensure that the little positive my health allows me to do also benefits the Revolution, the only real reason to live."


 

Clara Zetkin (1857 - 1933)

Sun Jul 05, 1857

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Clara Zetkin, born on this day in 1857, was a German Marxist theorist, activist, and feminist, active in the revolutionary Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

Clara Zetkin was born in Wiederau, a peasant village in Saxony, now part of the municipality Königshain-Wiederau. Because of the ban placed on socialist activity in Germany by Bismarck in 1878, Zetkin left for Zurich in 1882 then went into exile in Paris, where she studied to be a journalist and a translator.

Zetkin was very interested in women's politics, including the fight for equal opportunities and women's suffrage, though always through a socialist paradigm. She helped to develop the social-democratic women's movement in Germany; from 1891 to 1917 she edited the Social Democratic Party (SPD) women's newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality). She also contributed to International Women's Day (IWD).

Around 1898, Zetkin formed a friendship with the younger Rosa Luxemburg that lasted 20 years. Despite Luxemburg's indifference to the women's movement, they became staunch political allies on the far left of the SPD. Luxemburg once suggested that their joint epitaph would be "Here lie the last two men of German Social Democracy."

In August 1932, despite having recently fallen gravely ill in Moscow, she returned to Berlin to preside over the opening of the newly elected Reichstag. There, she gave a speech urging Germany to reject fascism, stating "all those who feel themselves threatened, all those who suffer and all those who long for liberation must belong to the United Front against fascism and its representatives in government".

When Hitler seized power the following year, Zetkin once again fled Germany, dying in Moscow in 1933 at the age of 76.

"The working women, who aspire to social equality, expect nothing for their emancipation from the bourgeois women's movement, which allegedly fights for the rights of women. That edifice is built on sand and has no real basis. Working women are absolutely convinced that the question of the emancipation of women is not an isolated question which exists in itself, but part of the great social question."

- Clara Zetkin


 

Immigration Act of 1864

Mon Jul 04, 1864

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Image: An artist's depiction of immigrants arriving in New York City, undergoing health inspection in 1866


Passed on this day in 1864, the Immigration Act legalized wage-based indentured servitude to encourage immigration to the United States, allowing immigrants to forgo a year's wages to pay for their passage into the country.

Employers, such as railroad and mining companies, would contract an immigrant workers to come to the United States under guidelines established by the federal government and withhold their wages accordingly.

This law provided corporations with cheap labor that could and would be used to break strikes by domestic workers. After years of rigorous opposition by labor organizations, Congress repealed the law in 1868.


 

Anti-Rent Movement Begins (1839)

Thu Jul 04, 1839

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Image: A poster supporting the Anti-Rent Movement, aimed to end the patroon system in Rensselaer County, New York, United States. Its headline reads "ATTENTION! ANTI-RENTERS! AWAKE! AROUSE!" [Wikipedia]


On this day in 1839, tenant farmers on New York's oldest estate assembled in Albany County to adopt a declaration of independence from their landlord, initiating the longest rent strike in U.S. history, the "Anti-Rent War".

Their previous landlord, Stephen van Rensselaer III, who owned all 726,000 acres of the effectively feudal estate of Rensselaerwyck, had passed away a few months prior.

In their declaration of independence, the farmers stated "We will take up the ball of the Revolution where our fathers stopped it and roll it to the final consummation of freedom and independence of the masses."

This began a six year rebellion known as the Anti-Rent War, the longest rent strike in U.S. history.

In those six years, the farmers fought off attempts to collect rent by force, repelling a 500-man posse led by the Albany County sheriff in December 1839.

In 1844, the movement formed a prominent political party, known as the "Antirenter" party. In 1846, provisions for tenants' rights - abolishing feudal tenures and outlawing leases lasting longer than twelve years - were added to the New York Constitution.


 

Paterson Textile Strike (1835)

Fri Jul 03, 1835

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Image: Workers with rolls of finished silk in a Paterson silk factory in 1914. Image: Library of Congress


On this day in 1835, 2,000 workers, most of them children, from more than twenty textile mills in Paterson, New Jersey went on strike to demand working hours be reduced from their standard six day, seventy-eight hour work week.

In response to the strike, employers reduced hours to twelve on weekdays and nine on Saturday. This reduction broke the strike, and most of the workers returned to the mills.

Despite this concession, strike leaders and their families were permanently barred from employment in Paterson, blacklisted by the mill owners.


 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 - 1935)

Tue Jul 03, 1860

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, born on this day in 1860, was a prominent American humanist, author, socialist, and feminist, probably best known today for her loosely autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper".

Gilman served as a role model for future generations of feminists due to her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle, such as leaving her husband (rare for the era) and living with another woman in what was possibly, though unconfirmed, a romantic relationship.

Gilman is possibly best known today for her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", authored after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis. The story depicts the way in which sick women are maligned in a sexist society.

She was also an advocate for assisted suicide for the chronically ill, and died from a self-inflicted chloroform overdose in 1935 after a struggle with breast cancer.

"To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something."

- Charlotte Gilman


 

Patrice Lumumba (1925 - 1961)

Thu Jul 02, 1925

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Patrice Lumumba, born on this day in 1925, was a Congolese anti-colonial revolutionary who served as the first Prime Minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo from June until shortly before his assassination in 1961.

Lumumba played a significant role in the transformation of the Congo from a colony of Belgium into an independent republic. Ideologically an African nationalist and pan-Africanist, he led the Congolese National Movement (MNC) party from 1958 until his assassination on January 17th, 1961 in a coup by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, backed by Belgian colonizers.

Lumumba did not express a pro-capitalist or pro-communist ideology, attempting to remain neutral in Cold War politics. He sought assistance in stabilizing the new Congolese Republic from both the United States and the Soviet Union, accepting military aid from the latter after the U.S. refused to help him.

On Lumumba's legacy, his friend and colleague Thomas Kanza wrote "he lived as a free man, and an independent thinker. Everything he wrote, said and did was the product of someone who knew his vocation to be that of a liberator, and he represents for the Congo what Castro does for Cuba, Nasser for Egypt, Nkrumah for Ghana, Mao Tse-tung for China, and Lenin for Russia."


 

Medgar Evers (1925 - 1963)

Thu Jul 02, 1925

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Medgar Evers, born on this day in 1925, was an American civil rights leader who achieved national prominence for his efforts in fighting racial oppression in Mississippi, work for which he assassinated by white supremacists.

Evers led boycotts against businesses that discriminated against black people, worked to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi, and fought for fair enforcement of the right to vote. He also played a key role in securing the involvement of the NAACP in the murder of Emmett Till, helping publicize the events and secretly secure witnesses for the case.

Evers was assassinated on June 12th, 1963 by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens' Council in Jackson, Mississippi. His murder and the resulting trials inspired a wave of civil rights protests; his life inspired numerous works of art, music, and film.

All-white juries failed to reach verdicts in the first two trials of Beckwith in the 1960s. He was convicted in 1994 in a state trial based on new evidence.

"I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die, die gladly, if that would make a better life for them."

- Medgar Evers


 

Homestead Strike Begins (1892)

Fri Jul 01, 1892

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The Homestead Strike was an industrial lockout and strike which began on this day in 1892, culminating in a battle between the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and private security forces of the Carnegie Steel Company.

Unlike earlier strikes in U.S. history, such as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Homestead Strike was organized and purposeful, a sign of how labor agitation would develop in the modern era.

In order to break the union at the Carnegie Steel Factory, Henry Clay Frick locked union workers out of the factory on June 28th. On July 1st, thousands of workers, skilled and non-skilled, went on strike.

Frick hired the Pinkerton Agency to guard strikebreakers brought in via barge (the factory was on a river), but strikers patrolled a ten-mile stretch of the river to prevent them from making it to the factory.

On July 6th, the Pinkertons attempted to land under cover of darkness around four in the morning, however thousands of striking workers and sympathizers were waiting for them on the riverbank. When the agents tried to land, gunfire erupted, killing four people and injuring twenty-three on both sides. The Pinkertons surrendered, and many were beaten unconscious after leaving the boat.

The strike was forcibly put down by state militia, resulting in a defeat for the workers. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers collapsed, and its workers returned in August.

For his role in breaking the union, anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick.


[–] roig@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Thanks for the report. It's now updated and reported to apeoplescalendar.org

[–] roig@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

but you say "communist dictatorship" as if they weren't extremely common at the time.

No, could you explain how you get to that conclusion? it seems a excuse to regurgitate unrelated anticomunist talking points.

[–] roig@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Thanks, updated.

[–] roig@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks to catch it. The right move year is 1906.

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