Today in labor history Feb 4 IWW co-founder William D. "Big Bill" Haywood was born

[Omaha Steve]

February 4


February 4, 1869 - Labor leader and Industrial Workers of the World co-founder William D. "Big Bill" Haywood was born. A hard-rock miner at the age of nine, Haywood became secretary-treasurer of the Western Federation of Miners in 1900 and in 1905 co-founded the IWW. In 1907 he was charged in the bombing murder of former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg but was acquitted. His defense attorney was Clarence Darrow. He helped lead textile strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 and Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913, but his radicalism increasingly estranged him from many in the labor movement, including his old union, which dismissed him in 1918. That same year he was convicted of violating alien and sedition acts in effect during World War I and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He jumped bail and fled to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1928. He is buried beneath the Kremlin walls.

Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man launched the 1955 Montgomery, Ala. bus boycott and the birth of the civil rights movement, is born in Tuskeege, Ala. - 1913


Unemployment demonstrations take place in major U.S. cities - 1932

Thirty-seven thousand maritime workers on the West Coast strike for wage increases - 1937