May Day in Chicago: Labor to commemorate Haymarket martyrs (4 workers and 7 police were killed& mor)

[Omaha Steve]

http://peoplesworld.org/may-day-in-chicago-labor-to-commemorate-haymarket-martyrs/

by: Mark Gruenberg
April 22 2011

CHICAGO (PAI) - It's just one word in labor history with a lot of associations: Haymarket.

It's the chaos on a square on Chicago's near West Side: During a meeting on May 4, 1886 to campaign for an 8-hour day, and to protest police brutality against strikers, an unknown person threw a bomb as the crowd of 2,500 was breaking up due to a rainstorm. Then 176 police, with repeating rifles, charged against 200 workers.



Four workers and seven police were killed, and the resulting arrest and skewed trial of eight labor activists - dubbed "anarchists" by the frenzied popular press - set off a mass hysteria against unions that persisted for years, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Eight workers' advocates were convicted. Seven got death sentences. Three were hanged. Another had his head blown off by a dynamite cap, in his cell, on the morning of the execution. A courageous Illinois Governor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the others seven years later. After reading the trial transcript and the surrounding commentaries, Altgeld denounced the proceedings as a travesty of justice, and worse.

Altgeld issued the pardons on the day - one source says at the site - of the dedication of the monument to the Haymarket martyrs in Waldheim Cemetery, in forest Park, just west of Chicago.

FULL story at link.

[patrice]

1. Kick!