September 13, 1974
Striking miners in Brookside , Ky., won their 13-month battle against the Duke Power Company, Aug. 29, capping a nationwide walkout by the United Mine Workers (UMW) in protest of unsafe working conditions.

The Brookside victory not only means a contract for the 180 workers at Duke Power's Brookside mine, but it marks an important breakthrough for the thousands of other unorganized miners in eastern Kentucky. In addition, the settlement enhances the position of the UMW in its national contract talks, scheduled to begin Sept. 3.

When the Brookside strikers walked out in July 1973, it was over Duke Power's refusal to honor the UMW national contract terms. The miners had voted to be represented by the UMW, rejecting their previous bargaining agent, the Southern Labor Union, a notorious company union.

Duke refused to accept such demands as the right to strike, increased royalties for the welfare fund, decent pensions, and the right of the miners to an elected safety committee.

The UMW contract allows for 10 "memorial days" each year, traditionally used to commemorate miners killed on the job. Since the beginning of the century, more than 100,000 miners have been killed.

Seventy-three have already died in the mines this year.

September 12, 1949
After "deliberating" for two hours last week, a lily- white jury in Florida condemned two Negroes to the electric chair and a third to life imprisonment on charges of "rape." The trial itself was a rushed-up mockery of justice, lasting less than two days, and climaxed the anti- Negro pogrom which broke out early this summer at Groveland, Fla.

The three victims of lynch-law were Samuel Sheperd and Walter Irvin, 22-year-old veterans who were sentenced to die, and Charles Greenlee, 16. They were accused of raping Mrs. Norma Lee Padgett on a country road near Groveland on the night of July 16.

The cry of "rape" was just what the Ku Klux Klan elements in the area had been waiting for. It served as the signal for an immediate mob assault on the Negro community in Groveland in which their homes were shot up and burned and 400 Negroes were forced to flee for their lives, hiding in the woods and swamps. All this, like the frame-up trial that followed, was part of the white supremacist campaign to terrorize back "into their place" the Negroes who had begun to complain about the peonage conditions they were forced to live under.  
 
 
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