May Day

The presidential election of 1932 sparked a major turning point for American labor unions, bringing pro-labor president Franklin D. Roosevelt into office in 1933, along with a Congress sympathetic to labor.

In one of the largest such actions in South African history, the miners went on strike for a week and maintained their solidarity.

They carried protest signs and tried to convince the replacement workers not to take their jobs.

We planned an assembly where we would make our speeches; we called it a peace rally, but it was just going to be a handful of us upper-school girls.

Burns led the picketing demonstrations and served more time in jail than any other suffragist in the United States.

“They hate trade unions. They hate folks who try to organize. They hate Jan.”

In a strike, workers walked off the job and refused to go back until the company agreed to their demands.

Business owners locked their doors and joined the uncounted thousands of servicemen and civilians in the celebration that lasted through the night.

“Thoughtful planning, a belief in equality and diversity. Truly seeing everyone as an equal. They passed that on to my mother, and she passed it on to me.”

“This was the seventies. Lots of turmoil. Civil rights activism, yes. But lots of pushback.”

After collective bargaining failed, Carnegie shut down its Homestead plant and locked out the union workers.

The May Day parade in Cleveland spawned even greater violence, where mounted police and soldiers in trucks and tanks clashed with Socialist marchers who were sympathetic to the Communist cause.