Forgotten History: Pecan Shellers Strike Changes San Antonio Forever

Jan. 31, 1938, San Antonio, Texas is the capital of pecans, 50% of the national pecan process, shelling, and packaging was done on the west side of the city. More than fifty percent of the commercial pecan crop was grown within 250 miles of the city. There were 400 shelling factories in the city.

The center of the Hispanic community was also in the westside American with Mexican ancestry and Mexican nationals made up 40% of the city’s population and lived on the west side of town, so it made sense for the companies to use this labor pool almost exclusively. Until this day when 12,000 pecan shellers walked out protesting a cut in pay and poor working conditions.

While it might not seem to be a dangerous job shelling by hand was hazardous and hard. Shellers usually worked more than 10 hours a day, seven days a week for $2 to $3 weekly. Lighting was poor, inside toilets and washbowls were nonexistent, and ventilation was inadequate. The fine brown dust released by pecans exposed shellers to tuberculosis. This was a major disease concern, San Antonio averaged 148 TB deaths for every 100,000 persons, compared to the national average of fifty-four.

The strike began because of a pay cut. The Southern Pecan Shelling Company reduced the pay of shellers who had earned six or seven cents a pound (six cents for pieces, seven cents for halves) to five and six cents a pound. Wages for crackers were cut from fifty cents to forty cents for every 100 pounds.

The walkout brought an immediate halt to the processing of the pecans. Most of the workforce were women and it took courage to do the walkout, but there was little to lose. The west side of town, where most Mexican Americans lived, featured one of the worst slums in the United States with unpaved roads crowded with tiny tar paper homes. Many of the houses rented for as little as fifty cents a week, had dirt floors, and were without electricity, running water, or plumbing. Infant mortality was high as were dysentery and other diseases.

San Antonio’s city government’s reaction to the strike was immediate. The police chief, Owen Kilday, claimed publicly that only a few of the 12,000 workers employed in the pecan industry were participating. Propaganda by the city was quickly introduced to the local newspapers and radio. City officials tried to both downplay the severity of the strike and accuse the strikers of communism.

These accusations took on an unfortunate appearance of reality because the original strike leader, Emma Tenayuca, was a well-known figure in San Antonio politics who had connections to the Worker's Alliance, a national organization formed by the Communist party. Tenayuca’s husband was also an unapologetic Communist who had run for governor of Texas and often was in court fighting for immigrant rights. Donald Henderson, president of the United Cannery union, arrived to direct the strike. He soon passed this responsibility to CIO organizer J. Austin Beasley, however, Tenayuca stayed involved in the day-to-day activities of the strike and their lives, organizing to make sure there was food and other needs were met.

The picketing of the 400 factories was met with police actions as well. Kilday claimed that there was no strike and dispersed demonstrators and arrested picketers. In one week in February, 90 male pecan shellers were arrested and imprisoned with 200 other prisoners in a county jail designed to hold 60. Other organizations backed the city and the pecan industry.  The Mexican Chamber of Commerce, the American Chamber of Commerce, LULAC, and Archbishop Drossaerts of the Catholic Church in San Antonio also spoke out against the strike. They spoke out against radical activism and urged the strikers to return to work.

thirty-seven days after the strike’s inception, the striking shellers agreed to submit their case to arbitration. Governor Allred also convinced the Southern Pecan Shelling Co. to abide by the decisions of a three-man arbitration board. 

There was an unintended consequence of agreeing to arbitration, the strikers and the companies agreed to a new wage but the national labor board ordered a 25 cents an-hour wage. The appeals by both the union and the companies were denied. By November of the year, the Southern Pecan Shelling Company had turned to mechanized shelling, as did most of the companies. Over the next few years, the labor force dropped from 12,000 to 800.

While in the long term, the Pecan Shellers strike changed the industry and eliminated this huge source of jobs it also changed the political nature of San Antonio. This included Maury Maverick who became mayor and began working hard to include Mexican Americans in the city’s decision-making and the larger community. While improvement occurred slowly and fitfully, the end of the 1930s saw changing attitudes in San Antonio towards the poorest citizens of the city.

 

 

Picture, Pecan shellers striking in front of Southern Pecan Shelling Company in 1938. Courtesy San Antonio Light Photograph Collection, UTSA Special Collections--Institute of Texan Cultures

Sources:

https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/pecan-shellers-strike

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/pecan-shellers-strike

https://www.uiw.edu/sanantonio/gower.html

 

Four Bodies Hung From Same Tree Two Other Men Also Lynched

Jan. 31, 1893, Economic changes and industrialization often brought people into conflict, in the Jim Crow south the conflict was usually blamed on Blacks even when there was no evidence but a confession drawn out by torture.

This seems to be the case of a late-night lynch party in Tazewell County where four men were lynched in one location and a fifth hung for the same crime in a different part of the county. The men Jerry Brown, Sam McDonald, Spencer Branch, and John Johnson were lynched in Richfields Virginia where the crime they were said to have committed occurred. The fifth man named Sam Blow was lynched in Cedar Bluff.

The men allegedly murdered two prominent Buchanan County merchants Alex Ratcliffe and Bob Shortridge and robbed them. As the Black men were all railroad workers and the assault happened at the tracks the Tazewell County sheriff made an instant connection. Apparently, Jerry Brown did have a reputation as a “rough man,” and this was an additional reason to arrest him.

After several hours in custody, Brown was reported to have confessed. He said he and his friends saw the two men flashing money so they attacked them with a hatchet and club. Shortly after this, a mob of about 500 broke into the jail led by local magistrate James Hurt, and businessman   James Crabtree. The mob marched Brown to an oak tree across the train yard from where the two white men were killed and hung him.

By this time Sheriff's deputies had found Branch and Johnson and arrested them but knowing that a mob had taken Brown took them through the woods to Cedar Bluff to meet the train. When the deputies boarded the train they found it was under the control of the mob and it was being taken back to Richfields. Also on board was the fourth suspect Sam McDonald and who had confessed to being involved with the robbery and he had also confessed to the murder of Jo Hunt the year before. The three men were then hung from the same tree as Brown.

Another mob had found Sam Blow in Cedar Bluffs and had lynched him for his part in the murders, he was implicated in Johnson’s final statement as were two White men known only by the names Lambert and Harman. Although a posse was formed to find Lambert in West Virginia there was no mention of him being found. Deputy Tazewell County Sheriff Joe Peery also stated that a sixth Black man, Sam Barns, had been hung for his participation in the robbery/murder.

 

 

Sources:

https://www.newspapers.com/image/84741278/?terms=%22Jerry%20Brown%22&match=1&clipping_id=7852857

https://www.thehomesickappalachian.com/lynchings-in-southwest-virginia/

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/richlands-lynching-clinch-valley-news-february-3-1893/

https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/valynchings/gallery/jerry-brown-john-johnson-sam-ellerson-and-spencer-branch/

 

Texas Rangers Massacre 15 Innocent People Near The Border In 1918

 

Jan. 28, 1918, in the early morning hours armed men entered the homes of the farmers in small border town of Porvenir and took 15 men aged 14 to 72 out to the edge of town and shot them to death, riddling their bodies with bullets and then rode away.

These were Texas Rangers, and they had a taken it upon themselves to be judge, jury and execution of these men because there were rumors they had been part of bandit raid on the Brite Ranch a few miles to the south. Both Porvenir and the ranch were on the Texas side of the Rio Grande River which acts as the border between the two countries. While the killings and raid were in Texas, the victims of the massacre had family and friends on the Mexico side and that is where the other residents of Porvenir ran when leaving the town behind.

Over the next few days, they came back and collected their dead, buried them and gathered anything they owned that was left behind on the night of the raid. They also began talking and spreading the story of what happened.

The Rangers tried to cover up the massacre with reports that the men killed ere bandits hiding in the brush and they had been fired on from the dark. They also described the residents of Porvenir as “thieves, informers, spies, and murderers.” They tried to connect the dead to the former border raider Poncho Villa, who had moved to a hacienda in the southern part of the Chihuahua state and who was trying to negotiate a peace settlement and amnesty with Mexican interim President Adolfo de la Huerta. There was no evidence of Villa’s involvement in the Brite Ranch raid or any other recent border incursions.

The Mexican government initiated an investigation of their own into the incident in early February. The Mexican government made an official protest of the incident to the United States Department. The Eighth U.S. Cavalry Regiment also started an investigation as they rode with the rangers that night but had not been involved in the search of the town or the shooting. However they retuned to the town a few days later and burned it to the ground.

The school master of the tiny village Harry Warren wrote an account of the massacre, summarized the events in great detail, one of his students had went to him in the early morning for assistance. It was Warren who recorded the names of the victims.

Congressional Representative José T. Canales of Brownsville demanded a legislative investigation into the conduct of the Ranger forces and called for a reorganization of the force. All of these investigations also showed there was no evidence implicating the Porvenir villagers in the cattle raids.

Face with mounting pressure and conclusive evidence. The villagers were innocent Texas Governor William Pettus Hobby disbanded Company B of the Texas Rangers, firing 5 rangers and transferring another 5. The commander of the company Captain Monroe Fox reacted badly to this writing letters justifying what his men had done and restating that only bandits had been killed in Porvenir. Fox accused the governor of giving in to pressure from the Mexican government and accused Hobby of playing politics to secure the Mexican vote in future elections.

Relations between Mexico and the United States were in a period of flux and Secretary of State Robert Lansing was working hard to open relations and trade to a larger degree so he was in full support Hobby’s actions.

Fox resigned his commission with the Rangers in June after the Governor attempted to transfer him to a desk job in Austin. The legislature followed Hobby’s lead and more reforms, including a reduction of the Ranger force to four companies, and higher wages to attract and retain good men. Fox’s career with the Rangers was not over, but he never again saw Ranger duty along the border again either.

No criminal charges were ever filed against the Rangers involved in the Porvenir massacre but there were civil lawsuits in the following years. In June 1926, eight years after the event, Mexican attorneys filed twelve separate claims against the United States regarding the Porvenir massacre. Which resulted in treaty where victims of state violence filed claims through the U.S.–Mexico General Claims Commission. The Mexican and U.S. governments bilaterally created the commission to settle many claims of both Mexican and U.S. nationals arising between July 4, 1868, and the start of the commission.

Survivors and their descendants kept the story alive in their families until 2009 when they started working towards getting a memorial, which was placed by the state on the 100th anniversary in 2018.

 

Sources:

https://www.texasranger.org/texas-ranger-museum/history/biographies-20th-century-texas-rangers/captain-fox-porvenir-massacre/

https://www.porvenirmassacre.org/

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/porvenir-massacre

 

Three Men Lynched For Having a Fifty Dollar Bill

Jan. 24, 1879, Arkadelphia the county seat of Clark County, Arkansas was the center of a small crime wave in January of 1879, the crimes seemed unrelated based on local reports but still had the community on edge. One farmer, William Bullock had been attacked in his home with an ax, another White farmer was shot with a shotgun and lastly a farmer named R.M. Duff had his barn set afire and his house robbed.

Law enforcement had very little to go on but innuendo and rumors and when a Black laborer and his sons stopped at a store in Arkadelphia. The Black man and his sons went to pay for the things they were buying and presented the storekeeper a $50 bill. Well in the time of reconstruction/Jim Crow the idea of a Negro having such a sum of money automatically caused White people to be suspicious.

So, the sheriff was summoned and he didn’t accept that the Daniels men had been paid for any labor and arrested them. While Ben Daniels and his three sons were very vehement in saying they did not burn Duff’s barn and rob his home the Sheriff sent word to the circuit judge he had confessed. This rumor got spread around and although the four men were supposedly under protection at the jail hooded men came and took them.

Newspaper reports are inconclusive about what happened next, but it does appear they left Daniels oldest son Charles at the jail for some reason and took Ben Daniels and his two other sons Joseph and Louis to a nearby orchard and hung them for the crime.

Much of this is subject to conjecture with research by historians and civil rights investigators based on census records and the small sample of published news stories.

The Arkansas Gazette reported that the elder Daniels implicated all three of his sons and pled his own innocence. Other than the sheriff’s statement on the confession there was no other evidence any of the men committed a crime. There was no investigation into the lynching of the three men.

 

Sources:

https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/arkadelphia-lynching-of-1879-9242/

https://www.newspapers.com/image/571055721/?terms=Arkadelphia&match=1

https://www.newspapers.com/image/171732506/?terms=Arkadelphia&match=1

 

 

Forgotten History: The 1870 Massacre of the Blackfeet In Montana Territory

Jan. 23, 1870, Major Eugene Baker didn’t much care whether the Blackfeet people in the camp his men were surveying were warriors or not, whether they were peaceful or not, “That makes no difference, one band or another of them; they are all Piegans [Blackfeet] and we will attack them.” 

Baker was a fast-rising senior officer in the northwest and on this day he was in charge of three companies of cavalry, while there had been hostility between the Blackfoot Confederacy, comprised of the Blackfoot, Blood, and Piegan tribes, and the white settlers in the past and the recent killing of a White trader named Malcolm Clarke had inflamed settlers, while there was at this time no open hostilities. General Philip Sheridan had ordered Baker to take his men to find the killer of Clarke, a Blackfoot named “Little Owl’.

In the hunt for Little Owl scouts led Baker to a semi-permanent camp on the Marias River (also known as the Bear River). Little Owl and other known mountain chiefs were not in the camp, and the scouts informed Baker of this but he still had his men spread out along a ridge with the high ground for shooting, When the leader of the camp, Heavy Runner saw them he approached Baker with papers from Sheridan stating the band was peaceful and to be left alone. Baker promptly had Heavy Runner shot by the scout Joe Cobell and ordered his men to fire on the camp.

This assault caught the Blackfeet in the camp completely unprepared and they were defenseless. The shooters hailed down bullets penetrating the lodges, then the men rode in and set fire to the lodges. They shot everyone they could find or trapped them in the lodges and set them on fire.

The cavalry captured some 140 of Heavy Runner’s band and stole 300 horses. They set fire to the entire camp and destroyed as many supplies as possible.

Baker then discovered the survivors had smallpox and released them without food or shelter in the terrible winter conditions, reported to be minus 30 degrees, and in the end, there were few survivors. By historical investigation, it is estimated 90 women and 50 children were killed in the attack and with starvation and hyperthermia another 140 died.

The massacre was generally unreported in the newspapers for over two months, and then it was given scant coverage. Other reports did reach Washington D.C. and there were calls for investigation; however Commanding General of the Plains William Tecumseh Sherman deflected a public inquiry by silencing the protests of General Alfred Sully, the Bureau of Indian Affairs superintendent of Montana Indians, and Lieutenant William Pease, the Piegan Indian Agent who had reported the damning body count.

With little reporting and a complete whitewash by superiors, Baker stayed in command for another decade and the massacre got buried until indigenous people began to press for true history.

For many years, students and faculty from Blackfeet Community College have held an annual memorial on January 23 at the site. One year they placed 217 stones at the site to commemorate the victims as counted by Joe Kipp.

In 2010, the Baker Massacre Memorial was erected at the site.

 Photo: 

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/soldiers-massacre-the-wrong-camp-of-indians

https://www.legendsofamerica.com/na-mariasmassacre/

https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/sunday/blackfeet-remember-montana-s-greatest-indian-massacre/article_daca1094-4484-11e1-918e-001871e3ce6c.html

 

 

Black Teens Dancing On TV Leads To School Bombing

 

Jan. 19, 1958, to some In the Jim Crow South it was considered a mortal offense for Black teens to have fun, or at least show they were by dancing on TV. On Saturday the 18th students from the Howard School, a negro school, appeared on WDEF’s Saturday afternoon show “Dance Party” this led to threats against the school and students being called into the Chattanooga Daily Times.

 While this was after the Brown vs Board of Education decision Tennessee was only slowly

desegregating and had just built the Howard School in 1954, at a cost of $2 million dollars which was quite a sum for a southern state for a Black school.

 An explosion at the school fortunately happened early on a Sunday morning with no one in the building. The bomb was home made and was a type of pipe bomb with dynamite caps. It blew out over twenty windows and destroyed several doors. The blast cracked plaster and damaged hot water radiators. Damages were over a $1,000 ($10200 in 2023 dollars)

 The Chattanooga Daily Times reported that they had notified the police they had received threats to the school after the dance program had aired. The police reported that they too had received reports that people objected to the program and that one woman reported her sone was going down to the WDEF studio and ‘Wreck the place.’ Even though the police had this information the officers on Duty Saturday night apparently thought any threats were actually pranks. Police Chief E.H. Brown said that although someone had called saying they were going to blow up the school his men felt it was a prank based on the voice and some details. He said that it would be followed up on now and every effort was being made and a full-scale investigation was taking place.

 A second explosion went off in the neighborhood of the city’s Black YWCA club at 1:00 am on the morning of Jan. 27. This explosion caused only some broken windows in the neighborhood.

 After this second explosion rewards were offered by the Tennessee Law Enforcement Officers Association, The Colored Voters Association and the Men’s Civic League as well as the School Board. These rewards didn’t seem to have any effect as no arrests were made by the time of the March School Board meeting where the Howard School PTA demanded to know if there was any evidence.

 The school was also evacuated the following November for a bomb threat. While there was a clear pattern of intimidation being made against students and Negro activists in the city no arrests were ever made. 

Sources:

https://www.newspapers.com/image/604142627/?terms=%22Howard%20School%22&match=1

https://www.newspapers.com/image/585720284/?terms=%22Howard%20School%22&match=1

https://www.newspapers.com/image/604440901/?terms=%22Howard%20School%22&match=1

Sending The Queen To Jail: The Remarkable William Dorsey Swann Standing For Gay Rights

 Jan. 13, 1896, the Washington D.C. police court judge sentencing William Dorsey Swann for his crime of ‘Keeping a Disorderly House’ ( a euphemism for brothel) told the man he, “would like to send you where you would never see a man’s face again.” The judge was angry, “I would like to rid the city of all other disreputable persons of the same kind.”

Swann was a Black man, and it was 1896 so one might imagine that his race caused this outburst, but no race played no part in this. Swann was ‘The Queen of Drag” at a time when doing so was life-threatening.

On this day the judge sentenced Swann to 300 days in jail for his crime, which was basically hosting a ‘Drag Ball’. Washington D.C. Police invaded Swann’s home on January 3^rd and according to the Evening Star newspaper, “found a number of men, both white and colored to be the same character as Swann”

This wasn’t the first time Swann had been arrested and sent to jail for being ‘The Queen of Drag’ he had previously been arrested for holding one of his balls in 1888 and spent the night in jail. The difference is that in 1888 Swann was celebrating his 30^th birthday and was wearing a beautiful cream-colored gown which the police tore and Swann fought back in a rage. His employer at the time paid his bond.

He had also been arrested in a raid in 1887, in fact, Swann had a reputation and played up his nickname as ‘The Queen” so when there was a crackdown by authorities on immorality or perversion in the District, Swann was often under surveillance.

Swann took to this role as well, he organized these balls even knowing there could be raids and was always in front ahead of his guests and gave female names when arrested. In the 1880s, however, homosexuality—then known as sexual inversion or erotopathia was as nearly unanimously looked upon as both a moral abomination and a serious mental disorder; however, Swann still held a good reputation among employers and was spoken of with respect by them.

In July of 1896, Swann requested a pardon from the Office of President Grover Cleveland. Supposedly his health was deteriorating while in jail. This petition became one of the first, if not the first, request to recognize the rights of the LGBTQ community as equal to others. The pardon was denied, primarily because US Attorney. A. A. Birney gave a fierce and extreme disapproval of the life that Swann lived, stating:

“This petition is wholly without merit. While the charge of keeping a disorderly house does not on its face differ from other cases in which milder sentences have been imposed, the prisoner was in fact convicted of the most horrible and disgusting offences known to the law; an offence so disgusting that it is unnamed. This is not the first time that the prisoner has been convicted of this crime, and his evil example in the community must have been most corrupting.”

Swann served the rest of his sentence and continued to throw balls and live as the ‘Queen of Drag’, he died in Maryland in 1925

                                1887 Arrest

 

.

 

                                1888 Arrest

Sources:

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/57778963/the-first-drag-queen/

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/98640188/national-republican-washington/

https://rediscovering-black-history.blogs.archives.gov/2020/06/29/william-dorsey-swann-the-queen-of-drag/

https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/channing-joseph/drag-party

https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/stories/slavery-voguing-house-of-swann

Much of what we know about William Dorsey Swann comes from respected international journalist Channing Gerard Joseph and his tireless research

The Tompkins Square Outrage: Brutal Police Assault Against Out Of Work Immigrants

 

Jan. 13, 1874, the ‘Panic of 1873’ led to one of the worst economic depressions in world history as it impacted all industrialized nations and helped end the Reconstruction era in the United States. Conditions were bad with millions out of work in the major cities and thousands facing eviction and potential starvation. In New York City this came to a head this morning when over 7,000 unemployed workers gathered in Tompkins Square in New York City to protest and demand for more public spending and public works to get them back to work.

Formed in December 1873, The Committee of Safety in New York City was the main body to organize workers and tradesmen into cohesive groups to work towards better contracts and conditions. The leadership of the group had tried to organize a meeting with city officials but was denied any such opportunity

Labor rights were the last thing on the minds of city leaders. They were embroiled in personal and petty conflicts between the mayor and the aldermen and with ongoing corruption by Tammany Hall. The mayor, William Frederick Havemeyer, in his third term was battling to fill many civic offices. This battle got so petty and personal at times that the aldermen sent a petition to the governor the use emergency powers to remove Havemeyer from office.

Newspapers of the day declared themselves neutral reporters but in general continued to report that the worker demands were ‘Utopian’ and ‘impractical” some like the New York Herald intoned that the organizers were ‘Communists threatening to change the order of the nation’

Because some other protests and processions in recent weeks had attracted violence and disorder the police commissioners decided to pull the permit that the Committee of Safety had been granted, however, they failed to tell the leaders of the group and they continued to promote and recruit so that by 11 am there were 7,000 people in the park, and there were 1,600 police both mounted and on the ground. Soon there were orders to disperse the crowd and so the police descended on the group.

Police charged into the square, dispersing most of the crowds with brutal force, beating thousands with clubs. Police on horseback rode through the surrounding streets also beating people wherever they found them. Hundreds of men, many from the German Tenth Ward Workingmen’s Association, fought back, attempting to defend the people who were under attack.

Rumors spread panic across the city that day. Schools were placed under ‘police protection’ after rumors spread that ‘immigrants’ were planning to burn down the schools. City Alderman John Kehr, a strong opponent of the mayor, claimed that he had to jump off a streetcar to escape from angry immigrants.

In the end, it was reported that forty-six workers were arrested, thirty-five of them being ringleaders. the workingmen’s movement lost its momentum. There were other efforts to organize a march for the unemployed, but it proved futile. Thus, the Committee of Safety soon floundered and dissolved into the Industrial Political Party, which then disbanded a year later.

John Swinton, editor of the New York Sun exposed the complacency of City Hall and denounce the underhanded tactics used by police against the protestors. He also made comments before the New York State Assembly’s Committee on Grievances requesting an investigation into police conduct and afterward his comments and concerns were published in a pamphlet titled 'The Tompkins Square Outrage'. However, attempts undertaken to fire members of the Police Board for the Tompkins Square Park riot failed.

This act of violence, along with no consequences primed the police for many years of violence and surveillance of political and worker organizations. 

Sources:

https://www.geriwalton.com/tompkins-square-park-riot-of-1874-the-workingmens-fight/

https://peoplesworld.org/article/jan-13-1874-tompkins-square-riot/

Forgotten History: The Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 A Landmark Victory For Workers

Jan. 12, 1912, Prior to this day the idea of “Power To The People,” was an idea, a possible suggestion after it became a very viable way to overcome the oppressor.

On this day the women who worked at the looms in many mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts found out they had lost 32 cents a week and they decided to walk off the job. Because of a new law limiting the hour's children and women could work the textile companies automatically cut these women’s pay, and that wasn’t acceptable.

Lawrence, Massachusetts was a factory town with tenement housing for the mill workers. It was also a solid immigrant town full of people who came to the United States for a better life. From Eastern and Southern Europe, from Southwest Asia, these families came, and they had a powerful work ethic, but they wanted to be paid for it so when the companies tried to cut wages the workers stepped away, immigrants from 51 countries were recognized as union members during the strike.

The walkout spread quickly from mill to mill across the city. Strikers defied the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor that immigrant, largely female, and ethnically diverse workers could not be organized.

Polish women were the first to shut down their looms and leave the mill. As they marched through the streets, workers from all the city's ethnic groups joined them. the turn of the twentieth century, New England's factory towns were generally miserable places. Wages were low, rents were high, and living conditions were crowded and unhealthy. The factory floors were brutally hot in summer and painfully cold in winter. The machinery was dangerous; pressure to speed up production increased the risk of accident and injury. The workers who walked off marched through the streets of Lawrence shouting "short pay!"

Initially, the owners were unconcerned. Without the assistance of the more conservative and craft-skilled based American Federation of Labor, they felt they could easily break the strike. They had underestimated the commitment of the more radical Industrial Workers of the World, (I.W.W.)  and their own workers. The IWW stepped in and sent organizers to Lawrence. Relief committees were formed to provide food, medical care, and clothing to strikers and their families. everyone predicted that it would be impossible to mold these divergent people together, Yet every morning thousands of strikers, their numb feet crunching on the snow, chanted and sang protest songs as they paraded through the streets. Lines of state militiamen protected the massive brick mills with the spears of their bayonets pointed squarely at the picket lines of strikers who protested outside. Women didn’t shy away from the protests. They delivered fiery rally speeches and marched in picket lines and parades. The banners they carried demanded both living wages and dignity, “we want bread, and roses, too,” which gave the work stoppage its name, the Bread and Roses Strike.

For two months the mills stood nearly still and strikebreakers became more violent and abusive but the unity of the workers didn’t break. After a particularly violent weekend in Feb, 10th the workers gathered their children and sent them to live with family and supporters in New York, and Philadelphia. A riot broke out when parents were loading their children on the trains and hired thugs tried to stop them. The national reaction to this violence was harsh leading to congress holding hearings.

At the hearings, striking workers, including children described the brutal working conditions and poor pay inside the Lawrence mills. A third of mill workers, whose life expectancy was less than 40 years, died within a decade of taking their jobs. President William Howard Taft ordered an investigation into industrial conditions in Lawrence and throughout the nation.

William Wood and the American Woolen Company agreed to most of the strikers’ demands on March 12, 1912. Other manufacturers followed by the end of the month and many textile companies throughout New England, anxious to avoid a similar confrontation, followed suit.

At the end of the strike, IWW leader William ‘Big Bill’ Haywood addressed the strikers on the Lawrence Common on March 14, “You are the heart and soul of the working class. Single-handedly you are helpless but united you can win everything. You have won over the opposed power of the city, state, and national administrations, against the opposition of the combined forces of capitalism, in face of the armed forces. You have won by your solidarity and brains and muscle.”

 

Sources: 

https://dp.la/exhibitions/breadandroses

https://www.history.com/news/the-strike-that-shook-america

https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/bread-and-roses-strike-begins.html

 

Black Residents Flee Nodaway County Missouri After Black Man Burned Alive

 Jan. 12, 1931, Maryville, Missouri: Nodaway County Sheriff Harve England was supposed to request the National Guard’s aide to stop the lynching of Raymond Gunn. Missouri Governor Henry Caulfield had already sent them to the town to be prepared for riots and to assist the sheriff, but apparently the sheriff couldn’t be bothered to send the request and said, “I went home and came to bed,” after the mob had taken Gunn. The 63-year-old sheriff’s other excuse was that he felt called in the guard would have endangered those young men’s lives, “most of the members of the guard are young men 19 or 20 and I was afraid if I called them in with their automatic pistols there would be bloodshed.”

So, the mob of some 2,500 individuals took Raymond Gunn from the sheriff and his deputies and started marching him from town. Gunn had been arrested for the murder of a young schoolteacher by the name of Velma Coulter the previous December. Originally he was one of several suspects but his past with a conviction for sexual assault and a bloody footprint set him apart, and although he had tried to place suspicion on his friend Paul ‘Shire’ Smith, Smith was cleared and confirmed to be working in Omaha, Nebraska. Smith was held for his safety while being investigated but was released without incident.

Gunn reportedly did at one point confessed to the murder and the county prosecutor was going to try and gain a conviction and death sentence for him, but mob justice decided to guarantee it. While he was likely to in fact be convicted the pure, public brutality of his lynching outraged much of America.

The mob of 2,500 led Gunn to the one-room schoolhouse where Coulter had taught. There they doused him with gasoline and the school house and chained him to a pole on the roof, then both he and the school were set afire while the crowd watched. It took less than 16 minutes for Gunn and the school to both be reduced to ash.

As happened so often law enforcement did nothing to find the members or leaders of the mob. Both the county prosecutor, Virgil Rathbun, and the circuit court judge D. D. Reeves called the lynching a regrettable and deplorable action but were not inclined to impanel a grand jury. On the other hand, Governor Caulfield ordered the state attorney general Stratton Shartel to pursue an investigation, however, this was partly performative as Missouri law required the county prosecutor to request aid. Also in the immediate aftermath, the state legislature debated and then tabled a resolution condemning the lynching, supposedly because the ‘Wording’ made the Nodaway and Maryville authorities look like they were collaborating with the mob.

The national NAACP called on Governor Caulfield to remove Sheriff England from office, and while Caulfield did read the telegram, he did not remove England from office, however, the sheriff did retire the next year.

In the end, the only consequences were to the other Black citizens of Nodaway County. Between the lynching itself and the way the town of Maryville armed itself two weeks later when they heard Negros were marching on the city, fears of safety and certainty that the law could not protect them led to an exodus away from the area. Families lost their homes and in some cases property due to the unstable situation. The Sedalia Democrat newspaper reported that an estimated 65 Blacks moved away within three weeks of the lynching. A 1930 census had 90 Negros in the county, a 1932 survey found six.

          Raymond Gunn                   Sheriff Harve England

Sources:

https://www.newspapers.com/image/74468290/?terms=%22Shike%20Smith%22&match=1

https://www.newspapers.com/image/74468235/?terms=

https://www.newspapers.com/image/741665150/?terms=%22Raymond%20Gunn%22&match=1

https://www.nytimes.com/1931/01/13/archives/burns-negro-killer-on-victims-school-maryville-mo-mob-chains.html

 

The Terrible Fate Of An Interracial Couple In Lousiana

 

Jan. 11, 1896, the authorities of Jefferson Perish claim they are unable to discover the perpetrators of the arson and murder that killed Patrick Morris and his wife Lottie even though the couple’s 11-year-old son says he identified several members of the mob that killed his parents.

The Morris’ were an interracial couple who lived on a flatboat in the Continental Grain Company canal in Westwego Louisiana near the company’s large grain elevators. Patrick Morris worked for the railroad and the couple rented beds in their flatboat.

Whether it was just the interracial marriage and biracial child or something more has been lost to history. The local newspapers report that there was a large public outcry over the level of violence committed, however, they also make excuses for the crime. Among other things, they mention that Mrs. Lottie Morris was a rude and disrespectful woman and that the lodging of guests was illegal.

A mob of 20 men reportedly surrounded the home in the early morning hours and set it afire. When Mr. Morris came out the mob shot him a number of times. Young Patrick Morris Jr snuck out the back but was also shot at before he made it to the woods.

Mrs. Morris was found within the remains of the building, curiously her head had been separated from the body. There was no explanation for the violence committed against her. While it was said that the flatboat was used as a rooming house there was no one else there at the time.

Patrick Morris Jr was turned over to the New Orleans Waifs Home and there is no further record after reports of the grand jury. He appeared before the grand jury that was impaneled but everyone he named had a story and the jury refused to indict any adult based on the word of a child.

The Times-Picayune newspaper of New Orleans, Westwego is not far from the city and gives the most complete record of the incident with three stories over the span of a week. Even with several hundred words they could not explain what the disorderly conduct was that the neighbors were so upset over, nor were they able to get any authority to go on the record.

The Times-Picayune led their final story with, “to all appearances, the murder and cremation of Patrick Morris and his colored domestic partner had even been forgotten in Jefferson parish.” This appears to be the most honest statement in all their reporting. 

Sources:

https://www.newspapers.com/image/28193491/?terms=Patrick%20Morris&match=1

https://www.newspapers.com/image/28193755/?terms=Patrick%20Morris&match=1

Klansmen Kill Voting Rights Activist Vernon Dahmer

Jan. 10, 1966, the Klan wanted to shut Vernon Dahmer up and stop his voting registration drives, they did but brought the full power of the Department of Justice down on them.

In the early morning hours of Jan. 10th, the home and grocery of Mr. Dahmer were firebombed by the Klan as retribution for his years of work in civil rights and fighting to get people registered to vote and to the polls.

Although he could have passed for white and moved from Mississippi Dahmer was very aware of his place and the racial discrimination and early in his life decided he was going to overcome it. So, he worked hard and built himself up eventually owning not just his store but a sawmill and a 200-acre farm.

He had earned respect because of his labor and the fact he provided jobs in the community and was very active in the community not just in Civil Rights. However, Dahmer never lost sight of the struggle most Black Americans faced. He was elected president of the local NAACP and urged his friends and neighbors to vote.

Vernon Dahmer knew Sam Bowers, the Ku Klux Klan leader in the area, and was aware that because of his position and registration activism, it was probable Bowers had ordered his murder.

What Bowers was unprepared for was the reaction to the heinous act. President Lyndon Johnson called the murder, “a grievous tragedy,” and ordered his Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to make the full resources of the Department of Justice available to Forest County and Mississippi State officials. Mississippi governor Paul Johnson expressed dismay at such an open murder in his hometown and said, “We will do everything in our power to find these vicious and morally bankrupt criminals and make them pay.”

Often times this was rhetoric but Paul Johnson had learned from the previous case of the Mississippi Civil Rights Workers' Murders and praised the Voting Rights Act. He understood Mississippi’s reputation was damaging the economy of his state.

Also, White officials and community leaders were genuinely outraged. The Hattiesburg City Council set up a relief fund for the family, and a white-owned bank made the first donation. Whites and blacks alike donated furniture, clothes, and materials to rebuild the Dahmer home. Local officials pledged their full resources to solve the crime. 

All this focus led to 14 Klansmen being arrested for arson and murder, One pleaded guilty to arson, and three more were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Bowers and another Klansman were freed by hung juries, however.

In August 1991, the case was reopened, and in 1998, Bowers was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2006 at the age of 82. He had previously served six years in federal prison on civil rights violations in connection with the murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County in 1964.

 Sources:

https://www.splcenter.org/vernon-dahmer

https://www.civilrightsteaching.org/voting-rights/vernon-dahmer-civil-rights

https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2016/01/02/vernon-dahmer-day-honors-civil-rights-martyr/78039742/

1854: Jailed For Teaching Free Black Children

 

Jan. 10, 1854, Judge Richard H. Baker wanted to make an example of Mrs. Margret Douglas for having the audacity to teach free Black children to read, so he gave her a month in jail, which he considered lenient because she was a woman.

Douglas had been arrested in May of 1953 for the depraved educational crime when two Norfolk policemen entered her classroom. They took her and her daughter and the 25 children to the mayor's office where she was told her teaching was illegal, she argued then that she was only doing what the church was doing. The mayor released everyone, and Douglas thought the incident was over. She sent her daughter to visit family in New York for the summer. Then in June the city of Norfolk sent Douglas a summons to appear in court for her crime.

In November she reported to the court and functioned as her own attorney. Her defense was mostly based on the fact the Christ Church was teaching the same lessons she was. While this was entirely true the jury did not think much of it and the jury found Douglas guilty and their recommendation was a fine of $1. The judge postponed sentencing until January.

At the sentencing, Judge Richard Baker went over Douglas’s defense and stated he found it all improper and stated that the church was only teaching the necessary moral teachings and that helping free Blacks become literate was a danger to everyone in the community. In his sentencing, Baker defended slavery as part of the natural order and railed against “Northern radicals” for their interference in Southern life. He then told Douglass how he was tempted to give her the full sentence of a $100 fine and six months in jail but because she was a woman he had determined one month was enough to show the public not to violate the laws of Virginia.

The newspapers of the time were not kind to Douglass. They described her as a “dangerous white woman” and an “intrepid female.” The Norfolk Argus bid her good riddance by writing, “Let her depart hence with only one wish, that her presence will never be intruded upon us again.”

Upon release, Douglass moved to Philadelphia with her daughter and wrote a book on her experience and defending her actions. In her memoir of the experience, Douglass mentioned how she believed Caucasians were superior to Blacks. In court, she had admitted to previously owning a slave and would not commit to never doing so again. However bold Mrs. Douglass was her case is primarily representative of the White Supremacist Culture of the antebellum south even in the cities 

Sources:

https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=ljh

Oregon Executes On Innocent Man Rather Than A Marine In 1945

 

Jan. 5, 1945, “I am innocent. It’s easier to convict a Negro than a white person. So long everybody,” these were the last words of Robert E. Lee Folkes. Oregon executed Folkes for the murder of Martha James, a white woman.

The murder happened on a train

On Saturday, January 23, 1943, Train No. 15 left Portland's Union Station heading to Los Angeles. Folkes was a cook, also aboard was 21-year-old Martha James from Norfolk, Virginia, who was following her husband, ENS Richard James—who had departed earlier in the day on a train for troops. Also on the train was a marine, Harold Wilson.

At 4:30 a.m. James’ screams awakened the other passengers in the sleeping cars. They heard her scream, "My God, he's killing me!" Passengers found the marine Wilson next to the body covered in blood, but he said he had heard Mrs. James scream, then found her with her throat cut, but saw a man running away so he gave chase. Wilson claimed that a “dark” man had fled the scene moments before, Wilson said he gave chase toward the rear of the train, running past the kitchen where Folkes worked. 

Between Eugene and Klamath Falls, Oregon detectives questioned passengers and crew but found no murder weapon and no physical evidence. There was no suggestion that Folkes or any Black man was a suspect. Other passengers claimed to have seen Wilson repeatedly climbing in and out of his bunk, directly above the victim's, behaving suspiciously before and after the murder. 

However, it seems that the marine’s claims to have seen a “dark” man outweighed these statements and even the blood on his own hands and clothes. In fact, Wilson's description of the events and suspect changed in his statements to the police several times. More pertinent to this case was the fact the Navy released Wilson from the brig for an alleged sexual assault the day before. His commanding officer found him to be an ongoing problem and was sending him to a combat unit, as happened often during the war.

So why Folkes?

Well, he was in fact considered a bit of a problem for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He was an active and vocal member of the Joint Council of Dining Car Employees, and his family were close friends with the union president William Pollard. During the 1942 labor negotiations, Southern Pacific security surveilled and intimidated workers including Folkes. Labor unions were considered an enemy by a lot of people during the war for threatening slowdowns, especially Black unions. On the night of the murder of Martha James Southern Pacific detectives stripped Folkes naked, shoved him into a men’s lavatory, and browbeat him all night, releasing him only for duty shifts. He was sleep deprived and disoriented when Los Angeles police detectives grabbed him off the train in Los Angeles and shuttled him between Central Jail and Police Headquarters for another twelve hours of interrogation, with no lawyers present.

When his mother and common-law wife and sister arrived at the central jail to see Folkes, they reported to his lawyer that there was bruising around his eyes and face and his speech slurred. Regardless LAPD telephoned Linn County District Attorney Harlow Weinrick, claiming that Folkes had “cracked.” For the railroad, this was an implied threat to other “Uppity Negro Unionizers,” which would help keep others in line. Also, the war department in 1942 needed someone besides their own marine to be the center of this case, the murder of a war bride by another soldier would have been bad press indeed.

California extradited Folkes to Oregon, where he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death—all within three months. At trial, Weinrich introduced the so-called confessions. Folkes had denied his guilt in all statements that he acknowledged having made on the train ride south to Los Angeles and in one statement he supposedly made in LAPD custody. But in a second statement in Los Angeles, police said, he had “confessed,” although he was never given the opportunity to review that statement and never acknowledged having made it.

On appeal, the Oregon Supreme Court returned a five-to-two decision upholding the death sentence. The two dissenting justices questioned the integrity of interrogating officers; and Justice George Rossman, an expert on criminal procedure, argued that the “statements” contradicted sworn testimony from officers involved and should not have been allowed into evidence.

The Portland NAACP campaigned for Oregon Governor Earl Snell extend clemency to Folkes. They had organized both Black and White churches and the unions to help in this campaign; but Snell was under pressure from the War Department, police, and the governor of Virginia, who was in the same lodge as the victim’s father. In the end, Snell refused and stated, “I see evidence that convinces me beyond doubt of Robert E. Lee Folkes's guilt.”

On January 5, 1945, Folkes became the second Black man executed by the State of Oregon.

Sources:

https://www.gazettetimes.com/news/local/misplaced-guilt/article_35bff050-4f48-5aad-86bd-7b15ea0485e2.html

https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/conviction-of-robert-folkes/#.Y7ofJ3bMK3D

https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2021/08/oregons-murdered-war-bride-case-riveted-nation-in-1943-dubious-investigation-led-to-black-cooks-execution.html

https://offbeatoregon.com/1607b.war-bride-murder-3.399.html

https://www.newspapers.com/image/185511319/?terms=%22Robert%20E.%20Folkes%22