Studs Terkel was an author, activist, historian, and broadcaster.
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More than four thousand Philadelphia longshoremen, organized by African American IWW leader Ben Fletcher, went on strike and shut down one of the busiest ports in the United States.
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The Poor People’s Campaign was a multiracial effort to gain economic justice for poor people.
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Starting in the spring of 1934, longshoremen across every port on the West Coast struck against the unfair hiring tactics that they experienced daily.
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The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was signed, prohibiting Chinese immigration to the United States.
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A peaceful demonstration in Chicago for the eight-hour day ended in tragedy when the police barged in and a bomb exploded.
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Amidst a looming “garbage crisis” in Washington, D.C., on May 1, 1970, 1,700 sanitation workers went on strike to demand an end to racial discrimination, unsafe working conditions, low pay, and unequal pick-up routes.
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International Workers’ Day began as a commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket massacre in Chicago.
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Stonemasons and other construction workers protested for an eight-hour workday.
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The National Guard fired on striking miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado.
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Brazil’s military police gunned down 19 peasant farm workers in the Via Campesina movement who were marching for land sovereignty in 1996.
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An explosion at the Banner Mine in Alabama killed 128 men, almost all of them African American prisoners of the state who were forced to work in the mine under the convict leasing system.
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Boston University refused to approve negotiated contract, so the faculty union called a strike, with Howard Zinn as co-chair of strike committee. Other staff and librarians also went on strike that spring.
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The Southern Tenant Farmers Union broke away from a larger organization and became a racially integrated workers union.
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Community on the Move for Equality called for a march in Memphis, Tennessee in solidarity with sanitation workers.
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Entrepreneur Claude Albert Barnett launched the Associated Negro Press, or ANP, a nationwide and international news service that focused on current events, feature stories, opinions and other information important to African Americans but usually ignored by or unknown to white-owned mainstream media.
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The first mass work stoppage in the 195-year history of the Postal Service began with a walkout of letter carriers in Brooklyn and Manhattan who were demanding better wages.
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The film Salt of the Earth premiered at the 86th Street Grande Theatre, the only theater in New York City that would show the film.
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Most of the demands of labor unions were met in the 1912 Lawrence textile strike.
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