James Meredith, born on this day in 1933, is a civil rights activist who became the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi. He was shot on the second day of his "March Against Fear" against voter discrimination.
In 1962, Meredith became the first black student admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi after a violent protest against his admission, known as the "Ole Miss Riot", was quelled by the federal government.
Inspired by President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, Meredith decided to exercise his constitutional rights and apply to the University of Mississippi, hoping to put pressure on the Kennedy administration to enforce civil rights for African Americans.
In 1966, Meredith planned a solo 220-mile March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, in protest of racial discrimination in voter registration. The second day, he was shot by a white sniper. Leaders of civil rights organizations and unions, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Walter Reuther, vowed to complete the march in his name after he was taken to the hospital.
While Meredith was recovering, more people from across the country became involved as marchers. When the estimated 15,000 marchers reached Jackson, Mississippi, with Meredith on its front lines, it became the largest civil rights march in Mississippi history.
Crystal Catherine Eastman, born on this day in 1881, was a socialist lawyer, journalist, anti-militarist, and feminist who co-founded "The Liberator" and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Crystal and her brother, Max Eastman, were influenced by the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant religious festival with humanitarian values. The siblings lived together for several years on 11th Street in Greenwich Village among other radical activists, such as Ida Rauh, Inez Milholland, and Floyd Dell.
When the United States entered World War I, Eastman, along with Roger Baldwin and Norman Thomas, organized the National Civil Liberties Bureau to protect conscientious objectors, in her words "to maintain something over here that will be worth coming back to when the weary war is over". The NCLB later grew into the ACLU, with Baldwin at the head and Eastman functioning as attorney-in-charge.
"The last thing a man becomes progressive about is the activities of his own wife."
Carl Braden, born on this day in 1914, was a left-wing trade unionist, journalist, and activist who was charged with sedition by the state of Kentucky after purchasing a home in an all-white neighborhood on behalf of a black family. He was married to Anne Braden, a prominent civil rights activist in her own right.
In 1954, to sidestep the residential race segregation in Louisville, Kentucky, the Bradens purchased a house in an all-white neighborhood and deeded it over to the Wades, an African-American family who had been unsuccessfully seeking a suburban residence. White segregationists responded by burning a cross in the yard, shooting into the home, and eventually destroying the building entirely with dynamite.
For his role in the affair, Carl Braden was charged with sedition, his work for racial integration being interpreted as an act of communist subversion. He was convicted on December 13th, 1954 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
Immediately upon his conviction, Carl Braden was fired from his job and blacklisted from local employment. He served seven months of his sentence before he was released on a $40,000 bond, the highest bond ever set in Kentucky up to that time.
On appeal, Carl's case made it to the Supreme Court (Braden v. United States, 1961), which ruled that Braden's conviction was constitutional, although this was later overturned.
In 1967, the Bradens were again charged with sedition for protesting the practice of strip-mining in Pike County, Kentucky.
Image: Workers' protests in June 1976 in Radom. [tvpworld.com]
The Radom Riots began in Poland on this day in 1976 when tens of thousands of people began protesting and rioting in response to government increases in the price of food, chanting "We want bread and freedom" and fighting with police. This uprising took place in the context of social unrest throughout the country.
That morning, workers at multiple factories across Radom went on strike. By 11 am, thousands of protesters surrounded an administrative building in the city.
After waiting for an official decision on the issue of food increases for several hours, the crowd broke into the building, which had been evacuated, looting and setting it on fire and barricading the surrounding streets.
Because the state did not plan on Radom having an uprising of this size, police forces were initially overwhelmed and reinforcements did not arrive until later that afternoon.
Approximately 20,000 people battled with police forces. 198 people were wounded, 634 arrested, and several were killed. A few weeks after the uprising, a Roman Catholic priest died after being beaten by police, having joined the rioters and criticized the government in his sermons.
Despite the government crackdown, the price raises were reversed within 24 hours. The 1976 workers' protest against official economic policy was a watershed moment in dissent against the Polish People's Republic.
Image: A massive 1947 union rally in Madison Square Garden. A large sign reads "MR PRESIDENT: VETO THE HARTLEY-TAFT SLAVE-LABOR BILL"
On this day in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act became U.S. law after a heavily bipartisan vote, greatly restricting the legal rights of organizing workers during an unprecedented wave of strikes after World War II.
The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act, was enacted despite the veto of President Harry S. Truman, with many Democrats defecting from the party line to support the union-busting measure.
The Act was introduced in the aftermath of a major, unprecedented wave of strikes in the aftermath of World War II, from 1945-1946. Strikes were strongly repressed during World War II to not hamper the war effect. When the wartime restrictions ended, millions of workers across the country went on strike.
The Taft-Hartley Act prohibits unions from engaging in "unfair labor practices." Among the practices prohibited by the act are jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. The Act also allowed states to pass right-to-work laws banning union shops.
A pamphlet supporting a third, progressive party, published in 1948, had this to say on the vote:
"Every scheme of the lobbyists to fleece the public became law in the 80th Congress. And every constructive proposal to benefit the common people gathered dust in committee pigeonholes. The bi-partisan bloc, the Republocratic cabal which ruled Congress and made a mockery of President Roosevelt's economic bill of rights, also wrecked the Roosevelt foreign policy. A new foreign policy was developed. This policy was still gilded with the good words of democracy. But its Holy Grail was oil...
The Democratic administration carries the ball for Wall Street's foreign policy. And the Republican party carries the ball for Wall Street's domestic policy. Of course the roles are sometimes interchangeable...
On occasion President Truman still likes to lay an occasional verbal wreath on the grave of the New Deal. But the hard facts of roll call votes show that Democrats are voting more and more like Republicans. If the Republican Taft-Hartley bill became law over the President's veto, it was because many of the Democrats allied themselves to the Republicans."
Image: "On the barricades on the Rue Soufflot, Paris, 25 June 1848 (1848-49)", a painting by Horace Vernet [Wikipedia]
On this day in 1848, more than 40,000 French workers initiated the June Days Uprising after the state closed National Workshops that provided work to the unemployed, causing 10,000 casualties and 4,000 workers to be deported to Algeria.
The National Workshops had only been formed a few months earlier, when, on February 25th, a group of armed workers interrupted a session of the provisional government to demand "the organization of labor" and "the right to work".
In late June, the Second Republic began planning to close the workshops, leading to a national uprising. In sections of the city, hundreds of barricades were thrown up. The National Guard was sent in to quell the rebellion, and workers seized weapons from local armories to fight back.
The violence, which lasted just three days, resulted in more than 10,000 casualties and 4,000 participants to be deported to Algeria. Among the dead was Denis Auguste Affre, Archbishop of Paris, killed while trying to negotiate peace with an angry crowd.
The rebellion was successfully crushed, and the episode put a hold on revolutionary ambitions of radical Republicans at the time. In its aftermath, the French Constitution of 1848 was adopted, mandating that executive power be wielded by a democratically elected president.
The first president under this framework was Napoleon Bonaparte, who dissolved the constitution during his first term in office.
On this day in 1945, a general strike involving 42,000 - 200,000 workers began in Nigeria, starting with railway workers, later spreading to other nationalized industries and enjoying solidarity from private sector workers.
The labor action was one of the largest strikes in colonial African history at the time, and took place in the context of an inflationary crisis and a callous colonial government, who issued a statement blaming the public for their own grievances:
"Unless the public is willing to do without, or reduce the consumption of commodities which are scarce, or to substitute other commodities for them, instead of taking the least line of resistance and buying (regardless of value and price control) in the black market, no benefit will result from increasing cost of living allowance."
In response, a worker's communiqué stated "the situation can no longer be sustained...not later than Thursday, June 21st, 1945, the workers of Nigeria shall proceed to seek their own remedy with due regard to law and order on the one hand and starvation on the other".
The general strike took off on June 22nd and continued for 45 days. Nigerian labor leader Michael Imoudu (shown) played a key role in initiating the strike.
Image: Edward Snowden speaks about the NSA leaks in an interview with reporter Glenn Greenwald at the hotel The Mira Hong Kong. [Wikipedia]
Edward Snowden, born on this day in 1983, is an American whistleblower who leaked highly classified information from the NSA in 2013 when he was working as a CIA employee, exposing multiple governments' widespread surveillance programs.
Snowden's disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, prompting a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.
In 2013, the United States Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, revoking his passport. Two days later, he flew into a Moscow Airport, where Russian authorities noted that his U.S. passport had been canceled, and he could not leave the airport terminal for over one month.
Russia later granted Snowden the right of asylum with an initial visa for residence for one year, and he continues to reside there on extension today.
"Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give to an American."
Image: Helmeted demonstrators on a grassy bank, armed with flagpoles, c. 1970s. Photo credit Takashi Hamaguchi
On this day in 1966, the Japanese government announced the construction of an airport on farmland in rural Sanrizuka, without permission of displaced locals. The plans led to decades of resistance from locals in alliance with leftist groups.
The area around Sanrizuka had been farmland since the Middle Ages, and, prior to the 1940s, much of the land had been privately owned by the Japanese Imperial Household.
Many locals were economically reliant on the Imperial estate at Goryō Farm, and local farmers had a strong economic and emotional attachment to the land. After Japan's defeat in World War II, large tracts of royal land were sold off and subsequently settled by poor rural laborers.
In the 1960s, the Japanese government planned to build a second airport in the Tokyo area to support Japan's rapid economic development. After meeting resistance from locals on the site's first chosen location, the rural town of Tomisato, the government was donated remaining land in Sanrizuka by the Imperial Family.
Locals in Sanrizuka were outraged when the government announced its plans. The Sanrizuka-Shibayama United Opposition League Against the Construction of Narita Airport (or Hantai Dōmei) was formed in 1966, and began to engage in a variety of tactics of resistance, including legal buy-ups, sit-ins, and occupations.
Meanwhile, the Japanese radical student movement was growing, and the League soon formed an alliance with active New Left groups; one major factor drawing the groups the together was that, under the US-Japan Security Treaty, the US military had free access to Japanese air facilities. As a result, it was likely the airport would be used for transporting troops and arms in the Vietnam War.
The demonstrators built huts and watchtowers along proposed construction sites. On October 10th, 1967, the government attempted to conduct a land survey, backed by over 2000 riot police. Clashes quickly broke out, and Hantai Domei leader Issaku Tomura was photographed being brutalized by police, further inflaming anti-airport sentiment.
Protests further grew and intensified over the next few years as the state pressed on with attempts to build the airport. Protestors would dig into the ground, build fortifications, and arm themselves against police. Construction was delayed by years, and the conflict would cost the government billions of yen.
On September 16th, 1971, three police officers were killed during an eminent domain expropriation. Four days later, police forcibly removed and destroyed the house of an elderly woman, an incident that became yet another symbol of state oppression to the opposition.
One student committed suicide, saying in his suicide note that "I detest those who brought the airport to this land". In 1972, the protestors built a 60 meter-high steel tower near the runway in order to disrupt flight tests. Conflict continued through much of the 1970s.
In 1977, the government announced plans to open the airport within the year. In May, police destroyed the tower while demonstrators attempted to cling on to it, provoking a new wave of widespread conflict. One protestor was killed after being struck in the head by a tear gas canister. In March 1978, the first runway was set to open, but a few days prior, a group of saboteurs burrowed into the main control tower, barricaded themselves inside, and proceeded to lay waste to the tower's equipment and infrastructure, delaying the opening yet again to May 20th, 1978.
Resistance continued after the airport was opened. Although many locals began to accept the airport and leave the land, the focus of Hantai Dōmei shifted to opposing plans for additional terminals and runways, as the airport's current size still only reflected a fraction of initial plans.
Clashes continued through the 1980s - on October 20th, 1985, members of the communist New Left group Chukaku-ha broke though police lines with logs and flagpoles, successfully attacking infrastructure in one of the last large-scale battles of the resistance campaign. Guerilla actions and bombings continued as late as the 1990s.
Although this campaign of resistance has largely shifted out of public attention in Japan, its presence is still felt: until 2015, all visitors were required to present ID cards for security reasons, and the airport still remains only a third of its initially-planned size. The Sanrizuka Struggle has never completely ended, and the Opposition League still exists and holds rallies.
Image: A sketch depicting the public execution of the Molly Maguires, unknown author.
On this day in 1877, ten members of the Molly Maguires, a secretive Irish-American society associated with militant labor struggle, were executed in Pennsylvania on the basis of dubious evidence from an undercover Pinkerton agent.
After the Great Panic of 1873, Pennsylvania mine owners imposed a new contract on the workforce which lowered pay rates by 10-20%. This led to the Long Strike of 1875, which lasted seven months and compelled the governor order in troops to the region.
When the Long Strike failed, some Irish-American miners turned to tactics that had been employed in Ireland in the late 17th and 18th centuries, using oath bound societies, anonymous threats and in some cases violent retribution on those deemed hostile to their community. The Molly Maguires emerged from this historical backdrop.
In 1876-77, twenty suspected Molly Maguires were convicted of murder and other crimes on the basis of dubious evidence (mostly testimony from notorious Pinkerton Agent James McParland).
On June 21st, 1877, six of the convicted men were hanged in the prison at Pottsville, and four at Mauch Chunk, Carbon County (modern day Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania). American labor historian Philip Foner concluded that the men were likely framed due to their labor activism.
Image: An attempted lynching of Juan José Rincón, press secretary of the Peronist Youth of the Argentine Republic (JPRA) of Avellaneda [Wikipedia]
On this day in 1973, anti-communist snipers fired on a huge crowd of Peronists gathered at Ezeiza International Airport to witness the return of Juan Perón. At least thirteen were killed, and left-wing alliances to Peronism were severed.
Peronism is an Argentine political movement based on the ideas and legacy of Argentine military general and politician Juan Perón (1895 - 1974) and his wife Eva. Peronism was a popular third positionist political movement that had elements of left and right-wing political ideas.
On June 20th, 1973, Juan Perón was returning to Argentina after eighteen years of political exile in fascist Spain. A large crowd gathered to witness his return at Ezeiza International Airport; police estimated three and a half million people total were present.
At the time, an alliance of right-wing and left-wing movements existed within Peronism, with the Peronist Youth and the Montoneros exhibiting anti-capitalist politics. While the crowd was gathered at the airport, right-wing snipers began firing on the crowd, targeting the Peronist Youth and Montoneros, killing at least 13 people and injuring 365 more.
The Ezeiza massacre marked the end of the alliance of the left and right-wing Peronists which Perón had managed to forge. According to Hugo Moreno, "If [the general strike on] October 17th, 1945 may be considered as the founding act of Peronism...the June 20th, 1973 massacre marked the entrance on the scene of the late right-wing Peronism."
Albert Parsons, born on this day in 1848, was an American anarchist newspaper editor, labor activist, and husband to radical Lucy Parsons. In 1887, Parsons, with three others, was executed by the state during the Haymarket Affair.
Lucy Parsons was a well-known radical labor activist in her own right, dubbed by the Chicago Police Department as "more dangerous than a thousand rioters".
After fighting in the Civil War, Albert settled in Texas and became an activist for the rights of former slaves, later serving a Republican official during reconstruction. With Lucy, he moved to Chicago in 1873, working for radical newspapers and engaging in labor organizing.
In 1879, Parsons withdrew from all participation in electoral politics. In his memoirs, Albert writes "In 1879 I withdrew from all active participation in the political Labor Party, having been convinced that the number of hours per day that the wage-workers are compelled to work, together with the low wages they received, amounted to their practical disfranchisement as voters...
"...My experience in the Labor Party had also taught me that bribery, intimidation, duplicity, corruption, and bulldozing grew out of the conditions which made the working people poor and the idlers rich, and that consequently the ballot-box could not be made an index to record the popular will until the existing debasing, impoverishing, and enslaving industrial conditions were first altered."
In 1887, Parsons became one of four Chicago labor leaders convicted of conspiracy and hanged following the Haymarket affair, in which a workers' rally for the eight hour day devolved into a riot and anti-worker hysteria.
Parsons' final words on the gallows were "Will I be allowed to speak, oh men of America? Let me speak, Sheriff Matson! Let the voice of the people be heard! O-", but his words were cut short by the opening of the trap door.
Lucy Parsons continued her activism after his death, going on to help found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
"Formerly the master selected the slave; today the slave selects his master, and he has got to find one or else he is carried down here to my friend, the gaoler."
Jack Ryan, born on this day in 1938, is a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent and police officer who was fired in 1987 after refusing to spy on non-violent political activists.
Ryan had been an FBI agent since 1966, but was fired for this act of protest in September of 1987, ten months short of becoming eligible for a $300,000 pension and retirement.
In a report by the LA Times, Ryan stated his belief that the Bureau could reinstate him to a position which would not conflict with his personal beliefs, however this did not occur. Ryan also stated that U.S. involvement in Central America is "violent, illegal and immoral", and was openly critical of the FBI's COINTELPRO program.
Image: Colorado National Guardsman at the Emmett Mine in 1896 [westernmininghistory.com]
On this day in 1896, nearly 1,000 miners of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) walked off the job for higher wages, causing a lockout that shut down all mines in the district and the WFM to turn to revolutionary socialist politics.
The Leadville miners' strike was initiated by the Cloud City Miners' Union, the Leadville, Colorado local of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), against those silver mines paying their workers less than $3.00 per day, approximately $32 in 2021 American currency. The action was taken after a near unanimous vote from more than 1,000 miners the same day.
On June 22nd, mine owners in the area banded together, agreeing to a district-wide worker lockout and signing a secret agreement to maintain a unified front against the union: none of them would recognize the union or negotiate with it, and that no participant would agree to any concessions except by majority vote of the owners.
Leadville mine owner John Campion hired labor spies from both the Thiel Detective Agency and the Pinkerton Agency to spy on the union. Campion hired additional spies to report on activities of replacement workers imported from Missouri. The owners used their spies to develop a blacklist and exploit divisions among the striking workers.
At the time the WFM was associated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a more moderate union. Other WFM locals, particularly the Butte, Montana local, sent financial support to the strikers, but the AFL refused to provide both financial support and to call other union locals out in sympathy strikes.
On September 21st, a group of approximately 50 armed strikers began a series of pre-meditated attacks on mines in the area, attempting to destroy them with bombs and a homemade cannon. Four miners, all found to be members of the WFM, were killed, along with one fireman. This led to widespread arrests of WFM members and the arrival of the National Guard to the area.
The strike was defeated on March 9th, 1897. The failure of the strike to succeed caused the WFM to leave the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and turn towards more radical anti-capitalist politics. The WFM would go on to play a key role in founding the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905.
Mariya Kislyak was a Soviet partisan and leader of a Kharkov underground Komsomol cell, where she seduced and killed Nazi officers, actions for which she was executed by the Gestapo on this day in 1943 at the age of seventeen.
Kislyak was born to a Ukrainian peasant family in the village of Lednoe. She graduated from medical training for paramedics and housewives the day before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. During fighting in her hometown, a wounded Soviet soldier she had been taking care of asked her why the city didn't have a strong partisan movement.
When the soldier recovered, Kislyak contacted several partisans hiding out in a nearby forest and asked if she could join their cause, recruiting several acquaintances into the movement. With this organization, she helped kill Nazi officers, sometimes flirting with them to lure them into an isolated area where they could be killed out of sight.
When she received word that a Gestapo agent nicknamed "the Butcher" would be coming to Kharkiv, she and her partisan unit spent two days planning his capture. Kislyak rented a room right next to his at the farm he was staying at.
After courting him for a few days she lured him to a riverbank, where her conspirators captured him. After interrogating the officer, the group summarily executed him with a crowbar.
In response, more than one hundred villagers, including Mariya, were collectively arrested by the Gestapo and told they would be killed by a firing squad if the SS man wasn't found alive soon. After the plot became known, Mariya and two others were brutally tortured and interrogated for weeks.
On June 18th, the group of three was hanged and their bodies put on public display. On May 8th, 1965 she was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.
Image: Police officers charge striking miners, mass picket of the Orgreave coking plant, miners' strike, Yorkshire. Photo by John Harris. [theguardian.com]
On this day in 1984, the Battle of Orgreave took place in Rotherham, England when 6,000 cops attacked 5,000 picketing miners during the UK Miners' Strike (1984-85), leading to one of the most violent clashes in British industrial history.
Media reports at the time depicted the battle as "an act of self-defence by police who had come under attack", however the South Yorkshire Police (SYP) had to pay £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention, and malicious prosecution in 1991.
While the striking workers were dressed casually in t-shirts and not armed, the police came dressed in riot gear and were well-armed: they brought 42 horses, whose mounted officers wore helmets and carried staves twice as long as truncheons, and police with dogs were stationed at the side of the long field in front of the plant.
Mounted police charged and attacked the picketers, and footage of the event contradicted the official police narrative regarding the level of force involved. 95 people were arrested and more than 100 were injured.
Journalist Alastair Stewart characterized the Battle of Orgreave as "a defining and ghastly moment" that "changed, forever, the conduct of industrial relations and how this country functions as an economy and as a democracy".
Image: A photo showing the nine people killed in the Charleston Church Massacre: Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Ethel Lance, Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Rev. Daniel Simmons, Cynthia Hurd, Myra Thompson, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Susan Jackson, and Tywanza Sanders
On this day in 2015, the Charleston Church Massacre took place in Charleston, South Carolina when a white supremacist entered Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and shot twelve people, killing nine (shown). The shooter targeted the church in part due to its stature; Emanuel AME is one of the oldest black churches in the United States and has long been a center for organizing events for civil rights campaigns.
In 2016, he was convicted of 33 federal hate crime and murder charges and later sentenced to death. The Charleston massacre was tied with a 1991 attack at a Buddhist temple in Waddell, Arizona for the deadliest mass shooting at a U.S. place of worship.
Since then, however, two deadlier shootings have occurred at places of worship: the Sutherland Springs church shooting in 2017 and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018.
Angelo Sbardellotto was an Italian anarchist executed by the state on this day in 1932 for plotting to assassinate Benito Mussolini. He refused to beg for clemency, instead telling the court he regretted not succeeding in his plan.
Sbardellotto was born into a poor family who was compelled to emigrate to find work. Angelo and his father left Italy in October 1924, living in France, Luxembourg, and Belgium, where Angelo worked as a miner and a machine hand.
While working as a miner, he joined the anarchist committee of Liege, and was active in the activities to bring about the general strike in Belgium in solidarity with framed Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.
Already under surveillance as a suspected communist subversive, Sbardellotto was stopped by police in Piazza Venezia, Rome in 1932, found armed with two rudimentary bombs and a pistol, as well as possession of a Swiss passport.
Admitting to having entered Italy clandestinely with the intent of avenging socialist Michael Schirru by killing Mussolini (Schirru himself had attempted to assassinate Mussolini), Sbardellotto was interrogated and likely tortured by police before his trial a week later on June 11th.
When Sbardellotto's lawyer requested that he write to Mussolini directly to ask for his life to be spared, he refused, stating that he was only sorry that he had not carried out the attempt on Mussolini.
On June 17th, 1932, at twenty-four years old, he was put in front of the firing squad at the Bretta Fort. He refused last rites from a priest. Angelo's last words before being shot were "Long live anarchy!"
Image: Soviet T-34-85 in East Berlin on June 17th, 1953 [Wikipedia]
On this day in 1953, in what became an uprising of more than one million people, 300 East German construction workers protested at government buildings, demanding the reversal of a 10% increase in work quotas.
Due to an economic slump, the East German government had increased worker quotas (called "norms") by 10% across all state-owned factories. At the same time, the prices of food, health care, and public transportation had all significantly increased, leading to an effective monthly wage cut of 33%, according to historian Corey Ross.
Although the government quickly conceded on the matter of work quotas, the protests took on an anti-government character and spread quickly throughout all of East Germany. News of the initial strike had spread both through word of mouth and the Western "Radio in the American Sector" (RIAS), which provided sympathetic coverage of the protests.
Soviet troops and tanks entered East Berlin on the morning of June 17th and violently clashed with the protesters, who had stormed government headquarters. The East German Stasi engaged in mass arrests of thousands of people.
According to historian Richard Millington, around 39 people were killed during the uprising, the vast majority of them demonstrators. Seven Berlin victims were given an official state funeral in West Berlin on June 23rd, 1953.
Following the uprising's successful repression, many workers lost faith in East Germany's socialist state. According to historian Gareth Pritchard, there was a widespread refusal by workers to pay their trade union dues and support the ruling party.
In response to the incident, the East German state expanded its surveillance of workers to more closely monitor discontent, creating what journalist Chris Hedges called "the most efficient security and surveillance state" of its time.
Image: Los Angeles police officers beating a striking worker in a Justice for Janitors shirt with billy clubs, 1990
Justice for Janitors (JfJ) is a social movement that fights for the rights of janitors (caretakers and cleaners) across the US and Canada. Justice for Janitors includes more than 225,000 janitors in at least 29 cities in the United States and at least four cities in Canada. Members fight for better wages, better conditions, improved health-care, and full-time opportunities.
On this day in 1990, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) attacked immigrant janitors who were striking for the right to organize in Century City, making two women miscarry, hospitalizing dozens, and jailing sixty more. Police initially claimed to be defending themselves, however TV footage was aired that undermined this claim.
Despite the violence, workers voted unanimously to return to the scene of the attack and continue their protest. Janitors eventually won the right to form a union, doubling their pay and benefits. This victory gave significant momentum to the JfJ movement and led to successful protests by and organizing of janitors around the country.
