Chris Mahin Writes On The Anniversary Of The Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King

[Chris Mahin, whose writing appears on this blog often, contributes the following on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King.]

April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Below you will find the text of an article I wrote in 2006 about the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968 during the Memphis sanitation workers strike. It was written for the regional website of the union I worked for at the time. It describes what happened in the sanitation workers’ strike, the role played by AFSCME, and the attempts of the FBI to slander and isolate Dr. King. I thought it might be useful background material for anyone involved in events commemorating the anniversary of the assassination.
Thanks,
Chris
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April 1968:
Dr. King Is Killed Defending Labor’s Rights

Murder in Memphis: Life Magazine Cover

April 4 is one of the saddest days of the year. On that day in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. While many events are held each year to honor Dr. King’s memory, too often people forget – or have never learned — why he was in Memphis that spring. Dr. King went to Memphis to help striking sanitation workers – and paid for his stand with his life. That makes April 4 an important anniversary not only in African American history (and in U.S. history in general), but in the history of the labor movement as well.

On February 12, 1968, hundreds of Memphis sanitation workers went on strike. At the time, they were making less than $1 an hour and were eligible for welfare. They decided that they had had enough of poor wages, terrible working conditions, and a viciously anti-union mayor.

The workers were members of Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The strike was the culmination of years of mistreatment. The workers worked 12 hours a day carrying garbage with busted, leaking pails. Some of the pails were infested with flies and maggots, and the workers had no place to wash up in the yard when they had to leave the trucks. Some of the workers had no running water when they returned home after work. The workers had no real benefits of any kind.

This dire situation came to a crisis point on Feb. 1, 1968, when the accidental activation of a packer blade in the back of a garbage truck fatally crushed workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker.

"I Am a Man" became emblematic of the strike

Almost 1,400 sanitation workers joined the strike. They shut the city down.

The workers and their supporters marched daily to pressure the mayor and the city council to recognize the sanitation unit under AFSCME Local 1733. The men wore signs which read “I AM a Man,” a slogan that was eventually recognized around the world.

Tension grew in the city as Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb called the strike illegal and threatened to hire new workers unless the strikers returned to work. On February 14, the mayor issued a back-to-work ultimatum for 7 a.m. on Feb. 15. The police escorted the few garbage trucks in operation. Negotiations broke off. The newspapers began to report that more than 10,000 tons of garbage was piling up.

It was in that tense environment that AFSCME organizers appealed to Dr. King to come to Memphis to speak to the workers. Initially, King was reluctant. He was immersed in work preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign. This was a huge undertaking, an effort to bring poor people of all ethnicities to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1968 to protest poverty. But when AFSCME organizer Jesse Epps pointed out that the fight of the sanitation workers in Memphis was part of the same struggle as the Poor People’s Campaign, King agreed.

Once in Memphis, King immediately grasped the importance of what was unfolding there. On his first visit to the city, March 18, he spoke to a crowd of 17,000 people, and called for a citywide march.

On Thursday, March 28, King led a march from the Clayborn Temple, the strike’s headquarters. The march was interrupted by window breaking at the back of the demonstration. The police moved into the crowd, using nightsticks, Mace, tear gas – and guns. A 16-year-old, Larry Payne, was shot dead. The police arrested 280 people, and reported about 60 injuries. The state legislature authorized a 7 p.m. curfew and 4,000 National Guardsmen moved in.

On Friday, March 29, some 300 sanitation workers and ministers marched peacefully and silently from Clayborn Temple to City Hall – escorted by five armored personnel carriers, five jeeps, three huge military trucks, and dozens of National Guardsmen with their bayonets fixed.

In the last days of March, King cancelled a planned trip to Africa and made preparations to lead a peaceful march in Memphis. Organizers working on preparations for the Poor People’s Campaign in other cities were directed to leave those cities and come to Memphis, for it was clear that the Poor People’s Campaign could not be won without winning the fight in Memphis.

On April 3, 1968, Dr. King returned to Memphis. That evening, he gave an extraordinary speech to hundreds of people at Mason Temple. The speech has gone down in history as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Anyone who reads it today will notice that it is an eloquent statement of support for the sanitation workers. (That night, King called them “thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering.”) But it is also a farewell speech, the oration of a man who knew he might not have long to live, and who was searching his soul to make sense of his life, and his place in history.

In the speech, King emphatically rejected the calls not to march again because of an injunction:

“[S]omewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right!”

At the end of his remarks he referred indirectly to the underhanded attempts by racists, the FBI, and other forces to sabotage his leadership and destroy the movement, declaring:

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like everybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

Murder at the Lorraine Motel

Less than 24 hours after uttering those words, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Urban rebellions broke out in more than 60 cities. In response to pressure from all over the country, the federal government sent Labor Department officials to Memphis to mediate a settlement to the strike.

On Tuesday, April 16, AFSCME leaders announced that an agreement had been reached.  The agreement included union recognition, better pay, and benefits. The strikers voted to accept the agreement.

It was a bittersweet end to a long battle. The strike ended in victory, but at a terrible cost, the death of one of the foremost symbols of the fight for justice in that (or any) era. AFSCME’s victory in Memphis inspired other workers in Memphis to join unions, and other employees throughout the South to join AFSCME. The Poor People’s Campaign which Dr. King had been
working on when he went to Memphis did take place later in the tumultuous year 1968. As King had hoped, it brought together poor people of all ethnicities to demonstrate in Washington, D.C. – African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and whites.

Given Dr. King’s role in the Memphis sanitation strike and the tremendous community support that the strikers received, perhaps

Carrying on Dr. King's Legacy

the month of April ought to be a time to remember that not all labor leaders have an official position with a union — and that labor comes in all colors, and includes both employed and unemployed people. If we hold on to those lessons, we will honor what was won with such great sacrifice in Memphis in April 1968.

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Radium Girls Statue Dedicated in Ottawa, Illinois

Radium Girls Statue Dedication Is the Place to Be This Labor Day Weekend –  Friday, September 2nd, 11:00 AM, Ottawa, Illinois

On Friday, September 2, at 11:00 a.m. at the corner of Clinton and Jefferson streets in Ottawa, Illinois, a statue of a young woman holding flowers in one hand and paintbrushes in the other will be unveiled. She is the symbol of the Radium Girls, the young women who worked in the clock and watch factories dotting the Illinois Valley in the first half of the 20th century. This was the era of “glow in the dark” watch and clock dials, painted with deadly radium. Many of these workers died from the effects of putting their brushes in their mouths countless times a day to sharpen the points, as the companies trained them to do.

The statue will stand on the site of the Luminous Processes factory in Ottawa at Clinton and Jefferson. The City of Ottawa, community groups and local unions worked together to raise the funds and assure the successful completion of this project. Laborers Local 393, an affiliate union of the ILHS, has donated many member volunteer hours to prep the site where the statue will be placed.

It all started when student Madeline Piller made the Radium Girls the subject of her junior high history fair project, and then never forgot their story. Her father Bill Piller is a sculptor and she enlisted his help to honor these women, many of whom were laid to rest after their untimely deaths in the Catholic cemetery just outside of Ottawa. A Geiger counter passed over these graves will still register the presence of the deadly radium poison that took their lives.

The Ottawa Radium Girls were not alone. Radium-painting factories were also operating in New Jersey and Connecticut. In her book Radium Girls, Woman and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935, Central Michigan University historian Claudia Clark extensively documents the suffering of these young women and the fight they and their families mounted to obtain proper compensation from their employers.

On July 7, 1937, the Chicago Daily Times covered one such legal battle. Reporter John Main wrote: “Fifteen living dead women will appear before the Illinois Industrial Commission here on July 25. It will be the next-to-last act of what lawyers say is the biggest and most pitiful miscarriage of justice in the history of Illinois. The last act will be these women’s death – sure, tortured, horrible.”

These efforts for justice helped spark needed legislation concerning occupational diseases’ and workers compensation laws throughout the country. This Labor Day weekend, we commemorate the contribution made by the struggle of these young women to the health and safety protection of all working people.

The video Radium City (excerpt) movingly recounts this tragedy.  For the complete video (almost 2 hr documentary), click here.

The Artist And The Strike

Published in April, James Dennis’ new biography of a painting, The Strike, explores in a marvelous way the confluence of art and labor.

Robert Koehler’s The Strike is the book title.  Click the link to read more.

An Independent Labor Movement in the Offing? Rich Trumka Addresses Nurses

[It should be clear, first of all, that organized labor's official position for decades has been to reward its friends, punish its enemies on a "non-partisan" basis.  Even during the height of the Roosevelt era, the AFL claimed to be non-partisan -- meaning it did not endorse presidential candidates, and did not have a labor political action committee.  Nevertheless, from the 1936 election on the AFL nationally pushed the Democratic candidacy, while there were variations on local candidates (when Adlai Stevenson ran for Governor of Illinois, the state AFL endorsed his Republican, incumbent opposition as a demonstrated friend of labor).  The CIO developed a political action committee earlier than the AFL, but the AFL was completely won over to the need for some kind of electoral organization when the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947. In recent years labor leaders have articulated the need for independence from their lesser of two evils strategy.  That led to the formation of the Labor Party, which had some limited success within the trade union movement itself and some limited success with organizations outside the unions.  In  50s there was some justification for the AFL-CIO to call itself "labor" when large numbers of workers were production workers, and a large number of those were organized in unions.  By the 90s one of the things the Labor Party recognized was that most of "labor" was not in the "House of Labor," and therefore any political formation of labor would have to take that into account.  As the limited success of the Labor Party waned, some of the unions that had given the Labor Party support actually withdrew from the AFL-CIO under the aegis of "Change to Win,"  a new federation of labor.  There is a considerable dissatisfaction among labor -- and here I mean among people who need to work for a living, whether or not they are currently employed, independently of whether they have a union affiliation. With this in mind it is important to consider Rich Trumka's comments in the speech reported for The Nation by John Nichols as follows.]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/161208/afls-trumka-pols-selling-out-workers-ive-had-snootful-st

AFL’s Trumka on Pols Selling Out Workers: ‘I’ve Had a Snootful of This S**t!’

John Nichols

June 8, 2011

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka sent his strongest signal yet about the labor movement’s frustration with the dysfunctional politics of the moment—where Republicans go to extremes on behalf of big banks and multinational corporations, Democrats compromise and working families are left out of the equation.

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated…

Speaking Tuesday to the National Nurses United conference in Washington, where more than one thousand nurses from across the country rallied to begin the push to replace the politics of setting for less with a unapologetic demands for a new economic agenda, Trumka found a plenty of takers for his agressively progressive message.

“We want an independent labor movement strong enough to return balance to our economy, fairness to our tax system, security to our families and moral and economic standing to our nation,” declared Trumka, who in recent months has been repositioning the AFL-CIO as a force that will hold Republicans and Democrats to what he describes as “a simple standard: “Are they helping or hurting working families?”

“We can’t simply build the power of any political party or any candidate. For too long we’ve been left after the election holding a canceled check and asking someone to pay attention to us. No more! No more!” the federation president, a former United Mineworkers union chief, shouted above the cheers of the nurses.

Then he described a scenario all too familiar to union activists: that of trying to get officials who are supposed to be allies of the working Americans to act on their behalf with the same energy that Republicans bring to aiding corporations.

“For too long, we’ve been left after Election Day holding a canceled check, waving it about—‘Remember us? Remember us? Remember us?’—asking someone to pay a little attention to us,” recalled Trumka, who like many union leaders was frustrated with the failure of the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and other needed labor law reforms. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a snootful of that shit!”

There was no way to misread Trumka’s message for Democrats who have strayed on issues ranging from EFCA to trade policy to mounting an absolute defense of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

“When it comes to politics, we’re looking for real champions of working women and men. And I have a message for some of our “friends.” It doesn’t matter if candidates and parties are controlling the wrecking ball or simply standing aside—the outcome is the same either way,” he explained. “If leaders aren’t blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families’ interests, working people will not support them. This is where our focus will be—now, in 2012 and beyond.”

Trumka chose exactly the right setting in which to deliver that message. The NNU (which also welcomed this writer as a speaker at its gathering) has long advocated for a more miltant stance when it comes to politics, as evidenced this week by the union’s mass protest outside the headquarters of the US Chamber of Commerce. As the nurses blocked traffic, NNU executive director Rose Ann DeMoro led the crowd in chanting “Our street!” and then pointing at the Chamber building and shouting “Wall Street!”

That determination to take the fight to Wall Street is at the heart of the NNU’s new “Main Street Contract for the American People” that, among other things, demands that elected officials take a “Which Side Are You On?” pledge.

The pledge contrasts Wall Street’s push for “tax cuts for the rich and powerful” and “replacing Medicare with vouchers” with a Main Street Contract that seeks:

• 1. Jobs at living wages to reinvest in America.
• 2. Equal access to quality, public education.
• 3. Guaranteed healthcare with a single standard of care.
• 4. A secure retirement with the ability to retire in dignity.
• 5. Good housing, and protection from hunger.
• 6. A safe and healthy environment.
• 7. The right to collectively organize and bargain.
• 8. A just taxation system where corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share.
• 9. Restoring the promise—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

As Trumka speaks about that “simple standard” to demand of elected officials, politicians and their parties, he and the rest of the labor movement could find few better places of beginning than that pledge to support the NNU’s “Main Street Contract for the American People.”

Haymarket Incidents: John Brown, Jr. Writes to August Spies

[There is a direct route from John Brown and the fight to abolish slavery to the martyrs of Haymarket and the attempt to restrict wage slavery.  Old Brown himself was executed, as

John Brown, Jr.

were his spiritual descendants 30 years later, so Brown’s words, written shortly before his death, were a fitting communication, this time from his son to August Spies, awaiting the hangman’s noose in Chicago.  John Brown, Jr. was the eldest son of John Brown.  He fought with his father in Kansas and, 3 years after his father was executed, moved to Put-in Bay, Ohio, where he lived until his death in 1895.  He farmed and was listed on the census as a grape grower. The letter is reprinted from The Haymarket Scrapbook, edited by Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont (Charles Kerr, 1986)]

From John Brown, Jr. to August Spies, Haymarket martyr

Put-in-Bay Island Lake Erie,

Ottawa Co. Ohio, 7th Nov. 1887

Brother:

I send you by to day’s Boat, a basket of  Catawba grapes, pre-paid through, as per Express receipts enclosed. These grapes, 1 beg you to accept as a slight token of my sympathy for you, and for the cause which you represent.

   Four days before his execution, my Father  wrote to a friend, the following.

August Spies

“Charlestown, Va., Jail,

Nov. 28th 1859

It is a great comfort to feel assured that I am permitted to die for a cause,-not merely to pay the debt of nature, as all must.

John Brown”

That a like assurance may be a comfort to you, is the earnest desire of

Ever yours, for the cause of the faithful, honest laborer.-

John Brown, Jr.

Faithfully yours,

John Brown, Jr.

Waldheim, The Historical May Day, and The Tactics of Today — Lew Rosenbaum

Waldheim, The Historical May Day, and The Tactics of Today

300,000 workers demonstrated throughout the United States on May 1, 1886,  40,000 of them in Chicago.  The story doesn’t begin here and doesn’t end here.  But this is what May Day commemorates for the working class of the world — the battle to limit the working day to 8 hours.   Four days later, in response to police killings of workers on strike on the South side of Chicago, a few hundred workers assembled in Haymarket Square — corner of DesPlaines and Randolph — to hear a list of speakers decry the rule of the employers, the exploitation of the workers.  Mayor Harrison, after observing the peaceful and dwindling numbers of about 200 at the rally about to break up at 10 pm, left the scene instructing the police to end their surveillance. However the police chief massed 176 officers at the edge of the rally and, under circumstances to this day uncertain, a bomb was thrown and the resultant melee left police and protesters dead and wounded.  In the aftermath, eight anarchist labor activists — 7 of them immigrants, most of them never even at the rally — were arrested, tried,  convicted and 5 sentenced to execution.

One, Louis Lingg, presumably killed himself in his cell.  The other four condemned to die were hanged on November 11, 1987, all appeals exhausted.  The gruesome fact is that they struggled at the end of the rope for more than 7 minutes, twitching while the noose strangled the last element of life from them.  Their bodies were returned to their families where they remained in state in their coffins, tens of thousands of Chicagoans filed by to pay their respect.  Then, at noon on November 13, thousands of workers proceeded down Milwaukee Avenue picking up the caskets from the families along the way, beginning with August Spies who had lived farthest away.  Historian Bill Adelman, in Haymarket Revisited, puts the number of onlookers at half a million.  From downtown Chicago the mourners took the train 10 miles west to Forest Home Cemetery (German Waldheim), where they were buried.

I return here to the struggle for the 8 hour day, what seems something almost prosaic, defined in numbers.  Something as abstract as the concept of the working day.  How  do you

At the 100th anniversary in 1986

describe the working day?  What are its parameters?  Clearly the chronological limits are 24 hours at its maximum and approaching zero at its minimum.  There is of course a natural limit to the working day.  You can’t keep someone working 24 hours every day without killing the worker.  A worker who does not produce the minimum in value that is required to keep him or her alive starves to death.  Somewhere in between lies the length of the working day, and the struggle between capital and labor can be captured in that battleground.  While some have characterized this as the fight for a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.  Others as the fight for the workers’ fair share.  What’s fair is an ideological construct that sets the environment.  But the essence of this contest remains the requirement to limit the surplus value sucked, “vampire-like” as Marx says, from the arteries of the working class.  It’s a tug of war, sometimes pulling one way, other times pulling another, the ground shifting one way or the other.  As long as workers are engaged in production this  rope in the tug of war to determine the terms for the sale of labor power is something that neither side can possibly let go.

For the worker it is a matter of survival, a desperation that mere numbers, hours, percentages cannot evoke.  Beneath those numbers, the flesh and blood brought the workers in their hundreds of thousands out of their homes to look on and to take part in the funeral of 5 Haymarket martyrs (the other 3 were transferred to Joliet to serve out prison terms and were pardoned by John Peter Altgeld, Illinois governor, in 1893).

A number of sources indicate that Waldheim, the German non-denominational cemetery where the martyrs were buried, was chosen because it had no connection to an institution or church. The land had been used in part as burial grounds by the native people (one burial mound is preserved on the land today).  Following the Blackhawk War and the “Treaty of Chicago,” the native people (Pottawatomie) were driven west into exile.  The land was purchased by farmers and became used as a convenient place for laying Chicago’s deceased to rest, as health reasons convinced authorities in Chicago to prohibit more cemeteries within city limits. When the 3 surviving members of the Haymarket 8 died, they were also buried at Waldheim.  Since then, many labor activists and others have been buried here as well.  For a more complete history of Waldheim and the surrounding cemeteries, click here

Emma Goldman was buried here, as were many labor activists, anarchists and communists

In 1889, AFL president Samuel Gompers wrote to the first congress of the Second International, which was meeting in Paris. He informed the world’s socialists of the AFL’s plans and proposed an international fight for a universal eight-hour work day. In response to Gompers’s letter the Second International adopted a resolution calling for “a great international demonstration” on a single date so workers everywhere could demand the eight-hour work day. In light of the Americans’ plan, the International adopted May 1, 1890 as the date for this demonstration.

A secondary purpose behind the adoption of the resolution by the Second International was to honor the memory of the Haymarket martyrs and other workers who had been killed in association with the strikes on May 1, 1886. Historian Philip Foner writes “[t]here is little doubt that everyone associated with the resolution passed by the Paris Congress knew of the May 1st demonstrations and strikes for the eight-hour day in 1886 in the United States … and the events associated with the Haymarket tragedy.”

The first international May Day was a spectacular success. The front page of the New York World on May 2, 1890 was devoted to coverage of the event. Two of its headlines were “Parade of Jubilant Workingmen in All the Trade Centers of the Civilized World” and “Everywhere the Workmen Join in Demands for a Normal Day. The Times of London listed two dozen European cities in which demonstrations had taken place, noting there had been rallies in Cuba, Peru and Chile. Commemoration of May Day became an annual event the following year. (The Haymarket Affair)

A monument to the Haymarket Martyrs was erected in 1893.  Since then the area has been declared a national historical monument:

One of the most recent scenes in the dramas of Haymarket was the ceremony on May 3, 1998, marking the designation of the Waldheim monument site as a National Historic Landmark. Landmark status had been approved in 1997, and the plaque placed near the monument explained that it “represents the labor movement’s struggle for workers’ rights.” Once again the speakers were dominated by labor leaders, with the keynote address given by the president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, who criticized the latest instances of what he termed corporate greed and disregard for the welfare of workers. Present also were descendants of the martyrs, a representative of the National Park Service, the combined German-American Chorus of Chicago, and the German consul.

There are two things left to talk about here, that take this from the realm of a history lesson and pose some real questions of strategy and tactics for today’s movement.

The Haymarket Martyrs were immigrants, nearly all of them. They had come to the US from Europe looking for a better life, and were trade unionists.  They were propagandists, dedicated to introducing new ideas into a burgeoning working class movement, swelled by a Civil War that put an end to chattel slavery.  It was Marx who said that “labor in the white skin could not emancipate itself, so long as labor in the black skin was branded.” He went on: “the first fruit of the American Civil War for the abolition of slavery was the agitation for the eight-hour day, a movement which raced from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California with the seven-league boots of the modern locomotive.” Immigrants have  once again sparked a movement which has touched every section of our country, this time from Pacific to Atlantic.  Many of the immigrant marchers of recent May Days, along the parade route that took them past Haymarket Square, knew of the significance of May Day even if they were unaware of the hallowed ground on which they trod. And once again they are being squeezed by a tug of war:  this time often a tug of war from which they (along with their brothers and sisters in the countries from which they came) have been permanently excluded.

The second point is the matter of numbers.  That zero we referred to earlier.  From the introduction of machinery into production, the time necessary for workers to produce an equivalent value for their survival has dropped.  That is called “productivity.”  For a time, as long as the market of purchasers could increase, “productivity” could expand.  In order to gain a temporary advantage over competitors, corporations strive to increase productivity.  If for the corporation the ideal number would appear to be zero for necessary labor time (everything is surplus value), it means absolute starvation for workers or — workers that do not eat, wear clothes, take coffee breaks or need health care.  That is what immigrant workers and public sector workers alike are competing with:  an era of electronics and robotics that have made many categories of workers obsolete.  This puts the teacher, the sanitation worker, the auto worker, the garment worker on a par in terms of replacement. This is why the rhetoric for improved education is matched equally by deteriorating public schools that are no longer expected to fill the factories and and offices.

A new movement is about to be liberated, birthed. And if the one of the late 1800s moved with the speed of the “seven league boots of the modern locomotive,”  the new movement will move with a multiple of that speed, the speed of gigabytes on silicon chips, and what is loosing this energy is the chain reaction that separates labor from its time immemorial tug of war with its exploiter.

On this 125th anniversary of May Day, it’s time to rededicate ourselves, but not to the old tug of war. It is time to do different things,  to recognize the new nodal point at which we stand, to introduce the new ideas of our own era. Paying homage to the Haymarket martyrs does not mean bowing to nostalgia. It means recognizing the way that they broke with shackles of their times to migrate into their new era.  There is a metaphorical way in which we are now all immigrants.  The borderline on which we stand is the end of the era dominated by corporate-private-property, on the verge of potential economic abundance.  We must move, we must emigrate, but we cannot run away.  No matter what, the people must reorganize society in their interest, or corporations will  organize society to destroy humanity. The fate of humanity depends on what we do.

In addition to the sources in the text above, the following are essential resources:

Haymarket Revisited, William J Adelman (Illinois Labor History Society, 2004)

Haymarket Scrapbook, Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger, (Charles H Kerr, 1986)

Re-Enactment Of Haymarket Massacre April 30, 2011

Several events took place to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Haymarket, the even that spurred the May Day holiday. This is one of them. The photos are of the actual reenactment April 30, 2011.

The meeting 125 years ago had been peaceful and was coming to a conclusion about 10 pm. Mayor Carter Harrison, who was in the crowd, walked to the police station nearby and told the chief to send his forces home. Instead, the chief dispatched 176 officers to the scene. Here, marching across Randolph, North on DesPlaines, these "police" retrace the steps of the officers who attacked the 200 people left in the square 125 years ago

The wagon that is part of the sculpture in Haymarket Square reprises the makeshift platform from which the speakers addressed the crowd 125 years ago. Actors portraying the Haymarket martyrs and Lucy Parsons addressed the reenactment crowd.

Historian Tim Samuelson narrated the reenactment, pointing out the points of historic interest along the way. As the evening wore on 125 years ago, it began to rain and people talked about moving the rally to Zepf Hall (some of the crowd had actually gone there before the police charged). This is a picture of the building, still standing, that was then Zepf Hall.

The Haymarket monument sculpted by Mary Brogger was placed in Haymarket Square in 2004, located just north of Randolph on DesPlaines

Gauley Bridge, West Virginia 76 Years Ago

[A year ago a West Virginia mine explosion shocked the nation.  No new legislation has been passed to protect workers, no criminal sentences have been handed down to punish the corporations responsible.  It may be shocking, but it's not surprising, as the story below shows.  There is a long and dishonorable tradition of ignoring workers health and safety.]

“1500 Doomed”: People’s Press Reports on the Gauley Bridge Disaster

The deadly lung disease silicosis is caused when miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers inhale fine particles of silica dust—a mineral found in sand, quartz, and granite. In 1935, approximately 1,500 workers—largely African Americans who had come north to find work—were killed by exposure to silica dust while building a tunnel in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Ordinarily, silicosis takes a several years to develop, but these West Virginia tunnel workers were falling ill in a matter of months because of exposure to unusually high concentrations of silica dust. The crisis over silicosis suddenly became a national issue, as seen in this article in the radical newspaper Peoples’ Press. In 1936 congressional hearings on the Gauley Bridge disaster, it was revealed that company officials and engineers wore masks to protect themselves when they visited the tunnel, but they failed to provide masks for the tunnelers themselves, even when the workers requested them.

---

476 Dead

1500 Doomed in W. Va.

Tunnel Catastrophe

From Federation News, 1936 (Chicago Federation of Labor)

Picture Caption:

Their only gravestones [are] cornstalks waving in the wind, their shrouds [are] the overalls in which they died, 169 tunnel workers killed at Gauley Bridge were tossed into trenches in this field at Summerville, W. Va., to rot. As they keeled over in the death tunnel, one at a time or several in a day, choked to death by silicosis, they were hauled 40 miles to Summerville and dumped into the grave the same day. No identification, no coffins. The company paid the undertaker $50 a piece to bury them. A wife who came tearfully to claim the remains of her loved one was quietly driven away. There was no way in which his body could be found. They were all victims of America’s worst industrial disaster. Then government officials, newspapers and others conspired to keep this story from the public knowing that soon the witnesses would all be dead. The 26 foremen are already dead. In Gauley Bridge, Town of the Living Dead, men once strong and hearty waste away while loved ones grimly await their death.

Gauley Bridge, W. Va.—America’s greatest industrial catastrophe has been hidden from the public.

There are 476 known dead.

There are nearly 1,500 doomed to die. Of these 200 are believed already dead.

Daily they cough their lives away, their lungs clog, they grow weaker. Finally they fall.

Gauley Bridge, the Town of the Living Dead, shrinks a bit and hurries on. For practically every man in the whole community is doomed to a death like that.

In one cornfield, 169 bodies have been tossed, unmarked. One doctor has treated 307 other men. They’re dead. Some 200 have written desperate letters from other cities—and then have stopped writing!

Desperately, the corporation whose tunnel job caused this holocaust has tried to keep the facts from the public until the last witness was gone. That will not be long. Already all of the 26 foremen are dead.

Mrs. S. E. Harrah sent a two-line item to the county seat paper about ambulances—and her husband was fired. He son, a lawyer, investigated, talked suits. Not any more. Last September he died suddenly. “Heart failure,” they called it.

Mrs. Charles Jones brought suits. Her son, Shirley, 18, was the first to die. Then his brother Owen, 21, died. Then their brother, Cecil, 23. Then an adopted son, Oley Jeffrey. Then Mrs. Jones’ brother. She has lived through this horror to see her husband wither before her eyes. Once he weighed 182. Now he weighs 126. He will read his story; we draw the curtain here.

All for Greed

All this because a rich and powerful corporation valued dollars above lives.

When the Rinehart & Dennis, Co., contractors for the New-Kanawha Power Co., started tunneling through two mountains a mile east of Gauley Bridge, on a power project to cost millions, it knew the tunnel would go through silicate rock.

It knew that men working in the tunnel would breathe in the dust.

It knew that without protection they would get silicosis, deadly lung disease.

Behind Rinehart & Dennis was the New-Kanawha Power Co., set to build the tunnel, dissolved as soon as the tunnel was completed late in 1934.

Union Carbide at Top

Behind the New-Kanawha Power Co. is the Electro Metallurgical Co. This is the big company that will use and sell the New Kanawha power.

Behind the Electro Metallurgical Co. is the Union Carbide & Chemical Co., gigantic company spreading into many fields.

Power to be won from the mountains and the rivers of West Virginia was behind the building of the tunnel at Hawk’s Nest, near Gauley Bridge. Dams, powerhouses, and a tunnel through the mountains to increase the drop in the New River and the force of the water power—a huge project, with huge profits to be made, from the power and the enormous silicate deposits.

A huge project, started in 1926, not yet completed, though the death tunnel is done.

Millions have been spent—$20,000,000 already.

Four years ago, preliminary work done, the tunnel was started.

Engineers of the company had made tests. The mountains were full of silicate rock. Silicate—valuable, deadly if breathed into the lungs in large amounts.

No complete protection against silicate was known, when very fine, as in this case. But there were masks that helped. Ventilation shafts would carry some of the dust away.

Lives Against Dollars

These would cost a few thousand dollars, in the $20,000,000 project.

Should Rinehart & Dennis order the masks, the shafts?

The men who own the Electro Metallurgical Co. did not go into the tunnel. They did not see the fine particles of dust, so penetrating that a 48-ton locomotive with headlights on could not be seen five feet away.

They did not see.

The men who would get the profits but never go into the tunnel decided—

Not to buy masks, not to put in air shafts or any other ventilation.

Some 2,000 men worked in the tunnel, 400 to 1,100 at a time. They got 25 to 30¢ an hour and worked 12 hours a day.

They are all dead, dying or doomed to death.

Shirley Jones was the first to die. He was 18, thrilled to get his first job, in love.

‘We’ll Be Marryin’ Soon’

“Think of it, honey,” he told his girl happily. “A job! Twenty-five cents an hour, 12 hours a day. That’s—why, that’s $3 a day! We’ll be marryin’ soon, honey.”

Three dollars a day for 12 hours of hell in an airless tunnel filled with fine dust that kept you from breathing, that you might wash off your hands but would never wash out of your lungs.

That’s what Shirley Jones found.

Within three months, he was fighting for breath, fainting, going back to work and fainting again, shaken by agonizing pain in his chest. He was losing weight so rapidly his big bones were hardly covered.

“Don’t know what’s wrong, honey,” he gasped now to his sweetheart.

Finally he had to go to bed.

The First Death

One day he called his mother, Emma Jones, mother at 47 of so many children she had to count them to tell a stranger the number.

“Mom,” Shirley gasped. “I don’t know what’s wrong but I’m a-goin’ to die. I think it’s from my work. I want you to have me cut open. If you can get anything from the company, go ahead.

“And mom, get pappy and Uncle Raymond and the boys out of that hole.”

A few days later Shirley was dead.

But pappy and the boys stayed in the tunnel. Three dollars, maybe $3.60, a day’s a lot around Gauley Bridge, and if you didn’t work for the company what could you do?

They stayed in.

The boys are dead—Owen, 21, Cecil, 23, the adopted boy, Oley Jeffrey. Owen died second; Cecil, who had a wife and two children, last. Silicosis kills the young first. Mrs. Jones’ brother Raymond Johnson is dead. Her husband still lives!

What Was Andrew Mellon Doing in Gauley Bridge in 1926?

Watch the People’s Press for answers to these questions.

An Appeal for the Dying

In the name of greed, 476 men—at least—are dead. Another 1,500 are doomed of whom 200 probably are dead in other places.

The dying are unable to get state or federal relief.

The doomed who can still work cannot get jobs. Employers know they are doomed.

The wives and children of the dead, the families of the dying and the doomed live at the edge of the starvation line.

Greed put them there.

In the name of humanity, the People’s Press asks you to help them.

Any sum, large or small, $100 or 1¢ will make life a little easier for this Town of the Living Dead.

They will not get help from the millionaires who kill 2,000 men for a few dollars. That we know.

So we urge you to help them. Everything given will go directly to these people in desperate need.

Send what you can to:

The Gauley Bridge Fund,

Care of the People’s Press, Eastern Branch,

245 Seventh Avenue, New York City.

Source: People’s Press, 7 December 1935. NARA, Record Group 174, Department of Labor, Sec. Frances Perkins, Labor Standards — Jan.-April 1936, Box 59.

Remembering The Triangle Fire — Joshua Freeman In The Nation

[Chicago remembers the Triangle Fire on April 7, 2011.  Click here to find out more]

Remembering the Triangle Fire

Joshua Freeman

Joshua Freeman teaches history at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

This article appeared in the April 4, 2011 edition of The Nation.

On March 25, 1911, a fire that broke out in a bin holding scraps of fabric at the Triangle Waist Company, just down the block from New York City’s Washington Square Park, quickly spread, fed by cotton garments, tissue paper and wooden fixtures. Though the building that housed the clothing manufacturer was modern and advertised as fireproof, the cramped layout of the factory, a locked exit door, a flimsy fire escape that soon crumpled and inadequate fire department equipment brought a staggering loss of life. Within a half-hour, 146 workers had died, mostly young Jewish and Italian women, nearly half still in their teens. Two were only 14. More than a third of the victims jumped or fell from upper-story windows trying to escape the flames.

The 100th anniversary of the Triangle Fire is being commemorated by a remarkable array of events. As it does every year, Workers United, the union that represents garment workers, is sponsoring a ceremony at the site of the fire. (The building is now part of New York University.) Each year a fire department truck raises a ladder to the sixth floor, the highest its equipment could reach in 1911, painfully short of the eighth, ninth and tenth floors, where the fire occurred. Forums about the fire are being held in New York, Philadelphia, St. Paul, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the City University of New York is sponsoring a conference on the fire and its legacy. HBO and PBS are airing documentaries. At least six Triangle-related plays and four musical theater pieces are being performed in cities across the country, including one composed by five-time Tony nominee Elizabeth Swados. Concerts, an art exhibit, a poetry contest and a forty-hour fast are being staged to mark the centennial.

The attention being given to Triangle stands out in a society that rarely remembers anything connected to workers’ lives, struggles or tragedies. Names like Homestead, Pullman and Flint, associated with decisive labor battles, mean nothing to most Americans. Yet even before the recent flurry of activity, the Triangle Fire occupied a modest niche in national culture, the subject of novels, historical studies, a film, plays, books of poetry, document collections, websites and even children’s books.

Why its prominence? After all, there were worse industrial disasters, including four mining accidents in the United States between 1907 and 1917, each of which killed more people than the New York fire. At the time, by one estimate, industrial accidents took at least 100 lives a day. And if Triangle was New York’s worst occupational disaster before 9/11, there were deadlier calamities, including the 1904 fire on the excursion ship General Slocum, which took well over 1,000 lives.

Triangle commands our notice in part because of the specifics of the disaster. There is something particularly horrifying about being trapped in a fire and plummeting through the air to escape it (so much so that ninety years later, on 9/11, newspapers and television generally refrained from showing images of people jumping from the World Trade Center). That so many of the victims were young and female added a layer of poignancy, as we commonly associate youth, especially young girls, with innocence, making their deaths seem even more undeserved than those of older victims of mining explosions and industrial accidents. And the Triangle Fire took place in the media capital of the country, receiving massive press coverage, including harrowing photographs difficult to forget.

But if the horror of death, of young life snuffed out, figures centrally in the Triangle story, particularly as relayed in poetry, fiction and young people’s literature, the story looms large for another reason: it fulfills a deeply held belief, or at least a yearning to believe, that good can come out of suffering, that death does not have to be in vain. “Out of the smoke and the flame,” not only “downward dashed the girls,” as an Episcopal minister wrote at the time, but also came a host of government reforms, union advances and a political approach that at least for a while eliminated many of the worst horrors associated with industrialization.

The Triangle Fire occurred at a moment of radical challenge to the national structures of power. For more than a decade the union movement had been growing in size and strength, stretching from conservative craft unions in the American Federation of Labor to the radical Industrial Workers of the World, with emerging garment worker unions combining elements of both. During the two years before the fire, a wave of protests had swept through the garment factories of New York and other cities, beginning with the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” a general strike of young female makers of women’s blouses, including those employed by the Triangle Waist Company. The struggle of the “girl strikers” proved epic. For thirteen weeks the clothing companies used thugs and police to try to break the walkout, while the strikers won support from organized labor, socialists and women’s groups, including prominent figures like multimillionaire suffragist and socialite Alva Belmont. The strike ended in a partial victory, union settlements with some 300 companies (though not Triangle) and a general improvement of pay and conditions. The next year, a cloakmakers strike brought the “Protocols of Peace,” an innovative agreement with the employers that solidified the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and established a Joint Board of Sanitary Control to address the dangerous, unhealthy conditions that permeated the industry.

The garment strikes erupted from a world bubbling with the excitement of new ideas and movements—socialism, anarchism, women’s rights and industrial unionism. Even Theodore Roosevelt recognized that as a result of the rapid industrialization of the country and the enormous disparity of wealth it created, “The old laws, and the old customs…. are no longer sufficient.” What was called “the labor question” dominated political discourse—the issue of how to end the strikes and labor violence that had shaken the country and, more fundamentally, how democracy and economic inequality could coexist. Progressives and unionists sought to develop mechanisms to eliminate the worst abuses of capitalist society and give working people some say about their lives, on and off the job. Propped up by an expanding economy and a widespread belief in the idea of progress, a great optimism about the possibilities for change managed to survive the daily horrors of unrestrained capitalism.

The Triangle Fire catalyzed the forces of change. In its immediate aftermath, some unionists concluded that workers could depend only on themselves. Rose Schneiderman, an organizer for the Women’s Trade Union League, told a meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House, called to address industrial safety, “I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting…. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves.” Triangle spurred intensified union organizing, a crescendo that would peak in 1919, when one out of every five workers in the country went on strike, a figure never again matched.

But Triangle forced others to address the plight of factory workers, too. Democratic leaders in Albany, under pressure from the massive outpouring of public sympathy for the Triangle victims (some 400,000 people came out for a funeral procession), organized labor, the Hearst press, the socialists (one of whose leaders, Meyer London, got elected to Congress from the Lower East Side in 1914) and upper-class reformers like Wall Street lawyer Henry Stimson (who was to serve as secretary of war on two separate occasions), decided to embrace the cause of factory reform as their own. Two years after police with ties to Tammany were beating up strikers in front of the Triangle factory, up-and-coming Democrats Al Smith and Robert Wagner took charge of a state Factory Investigating Commission, staffing it with young female union leaders like Clara Lemlich, whose impassioned speech had set off the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” and social reformers like Frances Perkins, executive secretary of the Consumers’ League. The commission’s detailed report led to dozens of New York State fire and factory laws (many copied in other states) establishing new safety requirements, limiting working hours for women and children, and restricting production in tenement homes.

The alliance linking New York Democrats with unions and progressive reformers persisted through the 1920s under the governorships of Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, before blossoming during the New Deal. Perkins, who had witnessed workers jumping out of the Triangle windows, became the first female cabinet officer as labor secretary. Wagner, by then a senator, wrote the National Labor Relations Act, which facilitated the triumph of industrial unionism. Thirty-five years after that, a similar coalition of unionists, reform-minded professionals and liberal Democrats (joined, for reasons of political calculus, by Richard Nixon) engineered the Occupational Safety and Health Act. By the time Rose Freedman, the last survivor of the Triangle Fire, died in 2001 at 107, the number of deaths from workplace accidents had fallen to fewer than half those at the time OSHA was passed and just a fraction of the toll at the time of Triangle.

* * *

The unionization and reform that followed Triangle provides a feel-good element to an otherwise bleak story and accounts for some of its telling and retelling. Yet the triumphs—as remarkable as they were—proved limited in scope and durability. Government protections and benefits excluded many of the most exploited workers, like agricultural and domestic labor. And for garment workers, their moment of economic stability lasted only a generation or so; during the post–World War II decades, clothing manufacturers began leaving unionized production centers like New York City for rural and Southern locations, where organized labor was weaker and costs lower, and then for foreign shores. As the industry reorganized, sub-minimum and sub-subsistence wages, child labor and dangerous working conditions re-emerged, both in low-end shops in New York and Los Angeles that employed (as did the Triangle Waist Company) almost exclusively immigrant labor and in the vast archipelago of factories abroad—in Haiti, Central America, China and Bangladesh—where young women toil to feed apparel to American retailers.

The re-emergence of sweated labor in the garment industry previewed a broader degradation of work that has occurred since the 1970s, in the face of deregulation and economic restructuring. Many industries, like meatpacking, went from providing stable, well-paid, unionized jobs to operating dangerous facilities with low pay, poor benefits and high turnover. Manufacturing increasingly left the country (one reason for the drop in occupational fatalities). No one should have been surprised when in 1991 twenty-five workers died in a fire at a poultry plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, where doors were locked to prevent theft, just as at Triangle, or when two years later a fire at the Kadar toy factory near Bangkok killed more workers than at Triangle, the result of a similar combination of flammable materials strewn about, crowded conditions, inadequate exits and a lack of fire safety preparation.

Today, as a cult of deregulation, a rabid ethos of unrestricted capitalism and the ability of firms to play workers in one country against those in another have seemingly sent us careening back in time toward a pre–New Deal regime of labor relations, there is less domestic opposition to sweated labor than 100 years ago (though low-paid workers overseas have been increasingly militant, evident in the fusillade of strikes in China). Periodic waves of moral outrage sweep across college campuses in antisweatshop campaigns, but as an organized force, labor has weakened to the point that the percentage of privately employed workers who belong to a union is now lower than in 1911.

Given the enormous differences, politically, socially and culturally, between our time and the time of Triangle, it would be glib to draw specific lessons for today from the reformers who pulled some good from the ashes of the fire. But perhaps we can learn from their broad approach. The seemingly technical, incremental reforms that came in the aftermath of Triangle—requirements for sprinklers and fire drills and unlocked exit doors that open outward—were no more the result of modest thinking than the sweeping New Deal reforms like Social Security that came two decades later. Rather, they came out of a shared belief by socialists, unionists and even progressive presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson that the society they lived in was fundamentally disordered, with institutions, rules and customs inappropriate for the needs of the people. The world needed reinventing. But if the spirit of revolution infused the air, so did the practical draw of social engineering and respect, grounded in daily experience, for the importance of even small changes in the conditions of work.

Today, the labor movement and progressives fight one dispiriting battle after another to defend wages, benefits, social programs and government protections from further dismemberment. Even the thrilling mobilization of labor and its allies in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana has remained, so far, defensive—necessary, but not enough even to win incremental advances. We live in a society that simply does not function for an ever-growing part of the population. It is too late to rally around restoring the status quo ante, an impossible and not particularly attractive ideal. Rather, like the social forces fused together by the flames at Triangle, we need to imagine a new way of being, a new set of customs and laws designed for our world of commoditization, financialization and globalization, which has brought so much wealth and so much misery—some new combination of regulation and self-organization. Only by recapturing the spirit of the reformers of a century ago, that the world belongs to us, to make right as we see fit, can we achieve even modest improvements in our daily reality.

Joshua Freeman

March 16, 2011   |    This article appeared in the April 4, 2011 edition of The Nation.

Annie Shapiro and the Chicago Garment Workers Uprising in 1910

[Marlene Targ Brill is a Chicago based writer with a distinguished list of children's books to her credit.  Her most recent publication celebrates Annie Shapiro, who began that uprising 100 years ago, just 6 months before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.  The following interview, conducted by Joan Brunwasser in Op-Ed News, explores Chicago as the center of the men's clothing industry and how that related to organizing the entire industry.   She came to write the book from a suggestion by her sister-in-law. as she reports in the interview,

As an author, I've often had people come to me with ideas they think I should write about.  I usually tell them to write the story themselves.  But when my sister-in-law told me about her aunt and the strike she led when a 17-year-old Russian immigrant to Chicago, I thought I would include her story in lists of topics for editors who I knew.  For years, no one was interested.  In fact, I was so sure no one would become interested, I threw away the articles my sister-in-law had sent to me about her aunt, Hannah (Annie) Shapiro.

Then, I got the magic email that authors love to read.

Conducted after the recent events in Wisconsin brought workers' rights to the fore once again, the interview and the book itself have great relevance today.  The entire interview may be read by clicking this link.]

Marlene Targ Brill on “Anne Shapiro and the Clothing Workers’ Strike”

opednews.com

My guest today is Chicago-based author, Marlene Targ Brill. Welcome to OpEdNews, Marlene. You have a new book out. Can you tell our readers about it?

photo credit: Richard B. Brill

Thank you for permitting me to talk about my latest book, Annie Shapiro and the Clothing Workers’ Strike.  This true picture book story discusses the role Hannah (Annie) Shapiro and other Chicago immigrants played in the 20th-century labor movement.  The book tells how 17-year-old Annie rebelled against 10-hour workdays, bullying bosses and cuts in already-low wages.  She walked out of a Hart, Schaffner & Marx Chicago sweatshop in 1910 and urged others to join her.  Because of her brave stand, 40,000 other workers walked out, closing down the men’s textile industry in Chicago and Milwaukee.  The strike triggered formation of a giant national union now called Workers United and resulted in employees nationwide receiving better treatment and wages.

There was so much going against Annie. She was a young person, an immigrant, who spoke broken English and was embarrassed about it. She was not well-educated; she was 12 when she had dropped out of school to go to work because her mother got sick. And her large family depended on her earnings to get by. Yet she risked everything by not accepting terrible work conditions and being willing to do something about it. Success didn’t come easy. Tell our readers what happened when she and the other girls who were her fellow workers approached the United Garment Workers Union for support.

The UGWU was male-only, and after all, this was 1910. At first, the men didn’t take the women seriously.  So Annie and the twelve original women who followed her out of Shop 5, where they worked, asked the Women’s League for assistance.  The League was a group of wealthy women who helped families who came to Hull House, Chicago’s settlement house founded by Jane Addams, for assistance.  League women gladly picketed with the strikers and raised funds to help families in distress from the strike.  After a couple thousand workers joined the protest, the UGWU decided the girls not only raised a serious issue but one supported by workers throughout the men’s textile industry in Chicago. [The interview continues here.]

[Brill refers in her interview to Workers United, the union that is descended from the original garment workers unions of the early part of the 20th century.  Workers United annually conducts a commemoration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York, as they have this year to commemorate the 100th anniversary of that tragedy.  This past September, Marlene Targ Brill spoke at the Workers United convention.  On Thursday, April 7, Noel Beasley will represent Workers United at the Chicago commemoration of the Triangle Fire.  For more information about that event click here.

To learn more about Annie or Marlene Targ Brill's other titles, go to www.marlenetargbrill.com or contact Lerner Publishing at www.lernerbooks.com.]