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To see another month, clink on the appropriate link. The external links provided in these pages are for those interested in reading more on the various people and topics. These sites are not affiliated in any way with CWA Local 4319. Above are pictures from the 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts strike. All pictures used in the Labor Calendar, unless otherwise indicated, are courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
April 4Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968 while helping striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. April 12Florence Reece, active in Harlan County, Kentucky coal strikes and author of the famous labor song "Which Side Are You On," was born in 1900. April 14In 1939, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published. The novel of social protest dramatized the story of "Okies"--workers who migrated from Oklahoma's dust bowl to the groves of California -- and experience tremendous hardships and exploitation along the way. April 15Asa Philip Randolph, an African-American and one of the most influential trade unionists in the US labor movement, was born in 1889. The organizer and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an all-black union, Randolph said: "The essence of trade unionism is uplift. The labor movement traditionally has been the haven for the dispossessed, the despised, the neglected, the downtrodden, and the poor." April 20In 1914, company gunmen attacked a tent colony of striking miners and their families in Colorado, setting it ablaze and killing 19 men, women and children in what is remembered as the Ludlow Massacre. April 27James Oppenheim's poem, "Bread and Roses", was published in Industrial Solidarity in 1946. The poem reads: "Our lives shall not be sweatedIt was penned after Oppenheim saw a sign held by young mill girls picketing in the 1912 strike against woolen companies in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
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