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/

Several years after the #NewOrleans mass #lynching of #Mafia suspects, an 1895 #extortion attempt convinces authorities that the local Mafia has survived.

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.

Whatever #jordanNeely may or may not have said, the 5min chokehold his murderer placed him in was likely a #lynching, especially since bystanders did not corroborate the claim about the threats he allegedly made. #newYork #BlackLivesMatter

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

My latest article is up on #Substack. I have a few thoughts on people like #ClarenceThomas and #JaniceCombs using the image of a public #lynching to defend themselves or someone they love against serious allegations. #writer #blogging #journalism

https://shalanamillard.substack.com/p/the-imagery-of-a-public-lynching

Today in Labor History September 28, 1919: Thousands of whites rampaged through Omaha, Nebraska, setting fire to the Courthouse, lynching Will Brown, a black civilian, and attempting to hang the reformist mayor. 2 whites died. It followed more than 20 race riots across the U.S. that summer. Several years earlier, ethnic Irish rioters drove the entire Greek community from Omaha. The African-American population of Omaha had doubled from 1910-1919. Many had been recruited to work as strike breakers in the stockyards, exacerbating the racism of white workers in town. Then a white woman falsely accused a black man of raping her. Will Brown was arrested, and the woman was unable to positively ID him, but the racist crowd didn’t buy it and lynched him anyway.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #racism #lynching #Riot #omaha #nebraska #BlackMastadon

Army soldiers man an M1917 Browning machine gun and a 37mm 1916 support gun at North 24th and Lake streets in North Omaha. By Nebraska State Historical Society - http://nebraskastudies.org/1900-1924/racial-tensions/the-army-restores-order/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86754521