Today in Labor History April 14, 1917: IWW sailors went on strike in Philadelphia and won a ten dollar per month raise. Ben Fletcher, an African-American IWW organizer, was instrumental in organizing the Philadelphia waterfront. Fletcher was born in Philly in 1890. He joined the Wobblies (IWW) in 1912, became secretary of the IWW District Council in 1913. He also co-founded the interracial Local 8 in 1913.

In 1913, Fletcher led 10,000 IWW Philly dockworkers on a strike. Within two weeks, they won a 10-hr day, overtime pay, & created one of the most successful antiracist, anticapitalist union locals in the U.S. At the time, roughly one-third of the dockers on the Philadelphia waterfront were black. Another 33% were Irish. And about 33% were Polish and Lithuanian. Prior to the IWW organizing drive, the employers routinely pitted black workers against white, and Polish against Irish. The IWW was one of the only unions of the era that organized workers into the same locals, regardless of race or ethnicity. And its main leader in Philadelphia was an African American, Ben Fletcher.

By 1916, thanks in large part to Fletcher’s organizing skill, all but two of Philadelphia’s docks were controlled by the IWW. And the union maintained control of the Philly waterfront for about a decade. At that time, roughly 10% of the IWW’s 1 million members were African American. Most had been rejected from other unions because of their skin color.

Fletcher also traveled up and down the east coast organizing dockers. However, he was nearly lynched in Norfolk, Virginia in 1917. And in 1918, the state arrested him, sentencing him to ten years for the crime of organizing workers during wartime. He served three years.

You can read my full biography of Ben Fletcher here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2021/05/13/ben-fletcher-and-the-iww-dockers/

#OTD in 2019, #NewOrleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell delivered an official proclamation of apology for the 1891 #lynching of eleven Italian-American prisoners held at Orleans Parish Prison.

Read about it:
https://www.writersofwrongs.com/2019/04/nola-mayor-to-offer-apology-for-1891.html

Today In Labor History April 7, 1915: Jazz legend, Billie Holiday, was born. She was one of the first to sing Abel Meeropol’s, “Strange Fruit,” and performed the most well-known version of the anti-lynching song. Soon after her first public performance of the song, in 1939, the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics started gunning for her. Harry Anslinger, who was a racist, prohibition zealot, led the assault. He hired a black agent provocateur, Jimmy Fletcher, to befriend her and sell her drugs. And Fletcher conducted her first drug bust.
https://youtu.be/-DGY9HvChXk

#Americans should equate #jimcrow #laws with #fascism and utilize #lynching and forced #sterilizations and internment #camps and sun down #towns instead of #AnneFrank and #gestapo - fascism is not foreign

Today in Labor History March 25, 1931: The authorities arrested the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama and charged them with rape. The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American youths, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused of raping two white women. A lynch mob tried to murder them before they had even been indicted. All-white juries convicted each of them. Several judges gave death sentences, a common practice in Alabama at the time for black men convicted of raping white women. The Communist Party and the NAACP fought to get the cases appealed and retried. Finally, after numerous retrials and years in harsh prisons, four of the Scottsboro Boys were acquitted and released. The other five were got sentences ranging from 75 years to death. All were released or escaped by 1946. Poet and playwright Langston Hughes wrote it in his work Scottsboro Limited. And Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son was influenced by the case.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #scottsboroboys #racism #lynching #rape #prison #langstonhughes #richardwright #novel #naacp #communism #books #author #writer #fiction #alabama #BlackMastadon @bookstadon

Today in Labor History March 15, 1877: Ben Fletcher, African-American IWW organizer was born on this date. Fletcher organized longshoremen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He joined the Wobblies (IWW) in 1912, became secretary of the IWW District Council in 1913. He also co-founded the interracial Local 8 in 1913. By 1916, thanks in large part to Fletcher’s organizing skill, all but two of Philadelphia’s docks were controlled by the IWW. And the union maintained control of the Philly waterfront for about a decade. After the 1913 strike, Fletcher traveled up and down the east coast organizing dockers. However, he was nearly lynched in Norfolk, Virginia in 1917. At that time, roughly 10% of the IWW’s 1 million members were African American. Most had been rejected from other unions because of their skin color. In 1918, the state arrested him, sentencing him to ten years for the crime of organizing workers during wartime. He served three years.

Today in Labor History March 9, 1911: Frank Little and other free-speech fighters were released from jail in Fresno, California, where they had been fighting for the right to speak to and organize workers on public streets. Little was a Cherokee miner and IWW union organizer. He helped organize oil workers, timber workers and migrant farm workers in California. He 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.” 1917, he helped organize the Speculator Mine strike in Butte, Montana. Vigilantes broke into his boarding house, dragged him through the streets while tied to the back of a car, and then lynched him from a railroad trestle. Prior to Little’s assassination, Author Dashiell Hammett had been asked by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to murder him. Hammett declined.

Read my full bio of Frank Little here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/05/frank-little/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #IWW #union #strike #freespeech #indigenous #nativeamerican #cherokee #franklittle #civilrights #nonviolence #racism #vigilantes #lynching #author #writer #fiction #books @bookstadon

Cool cool cool

“#Whitesupremacists and other #antisemites have long used conspiracy theories about the Leo Frank case to cast doubt on the circumstances of the #antisemitic #lynching of Leo Frank,” an ADL spokesperson said in a statement to the Guardian. “We are deeply disturbed that any public official would parrot these hateful and false conspiracy theories, and we hope Kingsley Wilson will immediately retract her remarks.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/05/kingsley-wilson-pentagon-leo-frank

#USpolitics #Lynching

"This flag helped end lynching in the U.S." [3:51 min]
by AmericanExperiencePBS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-4Fbb5lR3c

Quote by AEPBS:
"Feb 6, 2025
How did a flag on the streets of Manhattan help end lynching in the United States?
FORGOTTEN HERO: WALTER WHITE AND THE NAACP premieres February 25 at 9/8c on @pbs, YouTube, and the PBS App."

#USbeware
#FascistsAreHere
#WorkersUnite #UnionStrong

Today in Labor History February 11, 1953: Cold War: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower denied all appeals for clemency for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The government executed them at Sing Sing in 1953. They had been convicted of espionage for the USSR. Their sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol (adopted by Abel Merepol, composer of the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit,”), maintained their parents’ innocence. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, decoded Soviet cables showed that their father had collaborated. They continued to fight for the mother’s pardon, but Obama refused to grant it.

Today, in honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the life of Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927), a West Indian-American writer, speaker, educator, political activist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by union leader A. Philip Randolph as the father of Harlem radicalism and by John G. Jackson as "The Black Socrates." Harrison’s activism encouraged the development of class consciousness among workers, black pride, secular humanism, social progressivism, and free thought. He denounced the Bible as a slave master's book, and said that black Christians needed their heads examined. He refused to exalt a "lily white God " and "Jim Crow Jesus," and criticized Churches for pushing racism, superstition, ignorance and poverty. Religious extremists were known to riot at his lectures. At one of his events, he attacked and chased off an extremist who had attacked him with a crowbar.

In the early 1910s, Harrison became a full-time organizer with the Socialist Party of America. He lectured widely against capitalism, founded the Colored Socialist Club, and campaigned for Eugene V. Debs’s 1912 bid for president of the U.S. However, his politics moved further to the left than the mainstream of the Socialist Party, and he withdrew in 1914. He was also a big supporter of the IWW, speaking at the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, and supporting the IWW’s advocacy of direct action and sabotage. In 1914, he began working with the anarchist-influenced Modern School movement (started by the martyred educator Francisco Ferrer). During World War I, he founded the Liberty League and the “Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro,” as radical alternatives to the NAACP. The Liberty League advocated internationalism, class and race consciousness, full racial equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, and armed self-defense.

You can learn more about the Modern School Movement here: https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/411-spring-2022/the-modern-school-movement/

#workingclass #LaborHistory #HubertHenryHarrison #blackhistorymonth #Revolution #communism #socialism #anarchism #IWW #union #strike #racism #lynching #birthcontrol #harlem #slavery #jimcrow #author #writer #nonfiction #books #BlackMastadon @bookstadon

Texas professor Diana Bradford takes a tour of historic sites exploring slavery, terror and exploitation while musing how recent laws in Texas censor educator’s’ ability to include essential content. Bradford’s recounting shows her internal oppression and these laws’ effects on teachers, as legislators outlaw DEI.
#DEI #Texas #Alabama #Florida #slavery #history #Sims #gynecology #lynching
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/stories/why-wrong-teach-students-about-dei/

Fatal BEATING of Prisoner Goes Viral (w/ #MichaelBloch & #BenWhite)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znScT97B_P0

Today in Labor History December 17, 1951: American Civil Rights Congress (CRC) delivered their "We Charge Genocide" paper to the UN. They accused the U.S. government of genocide based on the UN Genocide Convention, citing many instances of lynching, legal discrimination, disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, police brutality and systematic inequalities in health and quality of life. The U.S. government and press accused the CRC of promoting Communism. The State Department forced CRC secretary William L. Patterson to surrender his passport after presenting the petition to the UN.

Lynching Never Stops, Economy Woes Revive It - VSN

https://verdantsquare.com/lynching-never-stops-economy-woes-revive-it/

A healthy society doesn't worship killers.

#JordanNeely
#DanielPenny
#MAGA
#murder
#chokehold
#racism
#lynching
#BLM
#BlackLivesMatter

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/daniel-penny-jordan-neely-acquittal-racism-20241212.html

Today in Labor History December 11, 1917: Thirteen black soldiers were hanged for alleged participation in the Houston Mutiny. The cause of the mutiny, according to The Crisis Magazine, was the habitual brutality of white police officers toward black residents. The mutiny started on August 23, 1917, when a cop dragged an African American woman from her home and arrested her for drunkenness. A black soldier asked what was going on and was beaten and arrested, too. When Cpl. Charles Baltimore, an MP, found out, he went to the police station to investigate. He was beaten, too, then shot at as they chased him away. Rumors reached the military base that the cops had killed Baltimore and that a white mob was approaching. So, soldiers armed themselves and marched into town. A riot ensued in which 16 whites died, including 5 cops. 4 black soldiers also died. The army held three courts-martial in the wake of the mutiny. They found 110 African American soldiers guilty. 19 were executed in total, 13 on December 11. 63 more received life sentences in federal prison. No white civilians were brought to trial.

The Rev. Jesse Moore’s forehead was blown off with a double-barreled shotgun on Nov. 16, 1899, and suspicion immediately fell on his 19-year-old son, Elijah “Lige” Moore, who was sleeping in the same room that night, but claimed not to have heard the shot. https://rwklose.com/2024/11/16/i-cant-save-you-unless-you-do-what-i-say/ #lynching #justice #missouri

Today in Labor History November 11, 1919: Armed "patriots" from the American Legion attacked and destroyed the IWW labor hall in Centralia, Washington, killing five. They then kidnapped, tortured, castrated and lynched Wesley Everest, a WWI veteran and an IWW organizer. No one was ever prosecuted for Everest’s murder, but 6 Wobblies (IWW members) were convicted of killing an American Legion and spent the next 15 years in prison, as a result.

Today in Labor History October 26, 1892: Ida B. Wells published “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” which led to threats against her life, and the burning down of her newspaper’s headquarters in Memphis. Wells, who was born into slavery, was a journalist, educator, feminist, and early Civil Rights leader who helped found the NAACP.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #idabwells #racism #blacklivesmatter #blm #lynching #journalism #feminism #civilrights #BlackMastadon #naacp #writer #books #author @bookstadon