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In August 1908, a white mob attacked Springfield, Illinois’s Black community, destroying homes and businesses and lynching two Black men. National outrage over the violence helped spur the movement that created the NAACP the following year.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
The cotton pickers' strike of 1891 was a labor action of African-American sharecroppers in Lee County, Arkansas in September 1891. The strike led to open conflict between strikers and plantation owners, racially motivated violence, and both a sheriff's posse and a lynching party. One plantation manager, two non-striking workers, and some twelve strikers were killed during the incident.[1] Nine of those strikers were hanged in a mass lynching on the evening of September 29.[2]
In 1886 the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union had been founded by R.M. Humphrey, a white Baptist minister, reformer, and member of the parallel white Farmers' Alliance organization. Early in September 1891, Humphrey called for a national African-American strike of sharecroppers against planters, in response to the planters setting 50-cent-per-100-pound prices at their summer conventions.[3]
Despite its extensive claimed membership of millions,[4] and despite Humphrey's announcement of 600,000 members firmly committed to strike for $1 per 100 pounds,[5] the strike promoted for September 12 took hold nowhere. Additionally, many landowners who became aware of the planned strike took steps to suppress or outright prevent the strike through increased police presence and pacification tactics such as smaller raises.[6] Its failure was noted and documented with some satisfaction in newspapers across the cotton-growing south. The one exception was in Lee County, a location with its own history of conflict, on the Mississippi River and across from Memphis, Tennessee. Ben Patterson, a Black labor organizer from Memphis, traveled to Lee County at the beginning of September 1891 and began to organize a strike among local cotton pickers. Patterson's efforts were significantly more successful than those of Humphrey, garnering the support of at least twenty-five pickers in Lee County.[6]
Workers for planter Colonel H.P. Rodgers struck on September 20, demanding higher wages, and began traveling through the county looking for support. These workers were from Memphis, led by a Ben Patterson. Among other workers in the county they found no support. A brawl between striking and non-striking workers killed two on September 25.[7] On the 28th the strikers killed a notorious plantation manager named Miller and burned a cotton gin.
A posse, with some black members, was organized under Sheriff Derrick of Marianna to track down the remaining strikers and Patterson,[8] partly on the grounds that Miller the plantation manager had been deputized. On September 29 the search led north to an island near Horseshoe Lake in Crittenden County. The strikers had been trying to work north, back to President's Island and then to Memphis. In an open battle the posse killed two strikers and captured nine. At more or less the same time, Patterson alone escaped to the steamboat James Lee and admitted his story, but was extracted from the boat, taken ashore, and shot. The nine prisoners under guard by the sheriff's men were intercepted on the road by a masked lynching party, greatly outnumbering them, that took the prisoners and hanged them one by one.[9]
The Arkansas Gazette ran coverage under the title "Lee County Trouble Settled with Rope".[10] The incident directly led to the collapse of the Colored Farmers' Alliance.[11]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
The cotton pickers' strike of 1891 was a labor action of African-American sharecroppers in Lee County, Arkansas in September 1891. The strike led to open conflict between strikers and plantation owners, racially motivated violence, and both a sheriff's posse and a lynching party. One plantation manager, two non-striking workers, and some twelve strikers were killed during the incident. Nine of those strikers were hanged in a mass lynching on the evening of September 29.
Workers for the R. E. Funsten Company, a pecan-processing corporation based in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, held a labor strike from May 15 to May 24, 1933. The workers, consisting largely of black women employed at facilities in both St. Louis and nearby East St. Louis, Illinois, were organized by the Food Workers Industrial Union and were demanding union recognition, an increase in pay, and equal pay for both African American and white American workers. The strike ended in success for the strikers, but within a few years, the union had been crushed by the company. St. Louis had historically been a center for pecan-processing, and in the 1930s, the industry employed about 3,000 people, overwhelmingly black women. Most worked in nut-picking, the process of removing the edible nut from the shells. At Funsten, the largest employer, the black workers earned less and worked longer than their white counterparts. In early 1933, following several wage decreases, workers began to associate with the local Communist Party USA chapter which organized the workers under the Trade Union Unity League, which was affiliated to the party. That April, workers presented demands to management and after several weeks without an answer, declared a strike on May 15. The initial walkout involved about 900 workers, and by the second day, about 200 white workers had joined. The strike spread to other Funsten facilities as well as plants owned by other companies and involved an estimated 1,400 workers. The strikers rejected several compromise offers made by Funsten and received support from groups such as the Communist Party and the Unemployed Councils. Within several days, St. Louis Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann began to offer arbitration, and on May 24, the union ratified an agreement that saw wage increases near what they had requested. In the aftermath of the strike, eleven local union branches were formed and enlisted about 1,400 workers, while the Communist Party recruited about a hundred new members. While the union was initially successful in preventing any downsizing, the company responded by firing certain workers, mechanizing parts of the processing system, and relocating work to other areas. By 1935, the union league had been dissolved. However, historians have highlighted the strike's positive impact on labor organizing in the area, including other industries. Additionally, several historians have said that the strike foreshadowed other civil rights movements and protests in favor of expanded African American rights.
The Delano grape strike was a labor strike organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a predominantly Filipino and AFL-CIO-sponsored labor organization, against table grape growers in Delano, California, to fight against the exploitation of farm workers. The strike began on September 8, 1965, and one week later, the predominantly Mexican National Farmworkers Association (NFWA) joined the cause. In August 1966, the AWOC and the NFWA merged to create the United Farm Workers (UFW) Organizing Committee. The strike lasted for five years and was characterized by its grassroots efforts—consumer boycotts, marches, community organizing and nonviolent resistance—which gained the movement national attention. It received significant coverage in religious publications, and the Catholic church served as a mediator between the two sides in the later years. In July 1970, the strike resulted in a victory for farm workers, due largely to a consumer boycott of non-union grapes, when a collective bargaining agreement was reached with major table grape growers, affecting more than 10,000 farm workers. The Delano grape strike is most notable for the effective implementation and adaptation of boycotts, the unprecedented partnership between Filipino and Mexican farm workers to unionize farm labor, and the resulting creation of the UFW labor union, all of which revolutionized the farm labor movement in America.
The 1903 Oxnard strike was a labor rights dispute in the southern California coastal city of Oxnard between local landowners and the majority Japanese and Mexican labor force. The strike arrayed sugar beet growers, the American Beet Sugar Company, the grower-controlled Western Agricultural Contracting Company and local law enforcement against the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association (JMLA), a union of betabeleros, or sugar beet workers, in league with independent labor contractors and boarding student activists. The interethnic organizing of the strike would presage Oxnard Mexican and Filipino sugar beet worker participation in the California agricultural strike of 1933 and later the efforts of the United Farm Workers. The union would dissolve shortly after the strike, withdrawing their charter request made to the American Federation of Labor, with Mexican workers rejecting AFL President Samuel Gompers' demand for Japanese exclusion.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.
