They were joined by fifty supporters representing the NAACP, American Civil Liberties Union, National Lawyers Guild, Socialist Workers Party, several pro-desegregation groups, and the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, which organized the delegation.

The families, who live in predominantly white Louisville suburbs, testified that police, courts, and elected officials were unwilling to defend them against racist violence.

Mike Incashola, a Native American, complained to the court that instead of protecting his family, police treat him like the "troublemaker." Incashola said his family's windows have been shot out, their dog stabbed to death, and their children attacked on the way to school.

Last April forty people stood in their front yard screaming, "Get out of the neighborhood! Why don't you go live in a tepee!" A fire was set in the Incashola back yard on Christmas Eve. Alfis Coleman, a Black resident of Okolona, a white area where antibusing activity has been centered, told the court, "I'm not just here for my family. I'm here for everybody. If it can happen to my family, it can happen to anyone."

The Colemans have had bricks with racist notes attached thrown through their windows and have been shot at. Last March dynamite blew a hole in their driveway.

Barbara Daugherty and her six children lived peacefully in Lousville's Fairdale section for three years--until school segregation began last fall.

February 18, 1952
NEW YORK, Feb. 14--Spokesmen for the profit bloated steel corporations have consumed an entire week, in hearings before the Wage Stabilization Board on the steel contract dispute saying "no" to every single demand of the CIO United Steelworkers Union.

There would be no wage increase without a price increase they said, repeating the same refrain over and over again like a broken record.

They were unalterably opposed to a productivity wage increase, they said because it was "inflationary." They denied the right of the workers to share the benefits of increased productivity in the form of higher wages but reserved such benefits for the stockholders and company executives--which, presumably wasn't "inflationary."

The demand for the union shop, they said, was contrary to the most sacred traditions of the "free enterprise system" and they would refuse to recognize any decision by the WSB granting the union shop demand.

They were opposed, they said, to the union seniority demands and would resist any attempt to encroach on the "prerogative" of management to use the merit system. Owen Fairweather, attorney for the steel moguls, contended "the national interest would be 'poorly served' if the union won its seniority demands."

They reserve for themselves the sole right to determine incentive plans, job allocation, number and composition of jobs to be filled, etc., etc., and insisted that anything short of absolute company authority in such matters was "socialistic." And so on down the line.

In addition to company executives, lawyers, and economists, the steel tycoons corralled a bevy of college professors to bolster their case. One of these jokers swore that if the North-South wage differential were eliminated the South would be converted into a barren desert wasteland. When asked if steel produced under a lower wage scale in the South was sold at a lower price than steel produced in the North, the learned professor blushingly answered that it wasn't.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home