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   Vol. 69/No. 28           July 25, 2005  
 
 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
July 25, 1980
MIAMI—The Black community here erupted in anger July 15 when hundreds of Dade County cops occupied the Liberty City area.

At about 3:30 p.m. two cops chased several Black youths into the James E. Scott Housing Project. The youths were accused of trying to rob a motorist. When the cops ran into the project with guns drawn, an angry crowd began throwing rocks and bottles.

The cops called in reinforcements armed with shotguns, pistols, billy clubs, and tear gas. Within ninety minutes they cordoned off a nine-square-mile area. Bus service was suspended.

By evening, Coconut Grove, another Black area of the city where angry crowds threw rocks at cops, was also barricaded.

Hundreds of Blacks lined Northwest Twenty-second Avenue until late in the night. Police cars sped down the street shooting tear-gas canisters.

One of the men said, “We didn’t need an excuse. What we on the street understand is that McDuffie [a Black man beaten to death by cops, a murder that sparked a rebellion in the Black community in May] wasn’t the last one.”  
 
July 25, 1955
On the eve of the Geneva meeting of the Big Four, martial law was declared in Casablanca as civil war flared up once again. The fighting has temporarily subsided, but all the tensions that brought conflict remain. The oppressed colonial people of Morocco, speaking with the same voice as millions of people in Asia, Africa, and South America, have served notice that they will not tolerate diplomatic deals that leave them enslaved.

The new outburst of violence began on July 14 when a bomb of unknown origin exploded near a café, killing seven Europeans. The next day, French colonialists began a wave of terror and murder. A French mob lynched four Moroccans and invaded the old medina, the Arab section of the city, to burn, loot and kill.

The French government in Paris, hoping to salvage its colonial possessions in North Africa in spite of the liberation movement, recently sent Gilbert Grandval to the Moroccan protectorate, to seek conciliation through promises and meager concessions. But the French colonialists in Morocco, as in Tunisia and Algeria, refuse to yield an inch. They want their privileges left intact.  
 
July 26, 1930
Five workers arrested last week in Scranton [Pennsylvania] and charged with sedition are facing 20 years in prison. They were jailed when the anthracite mine owners and their flunkies in political office feared that a strike of 1,200 members of the United Mine Workers Union for equalization of work would develop into a militant struggle led by the National Miners Union. The strike however, was short-lived as the Lewis-Boylan machine ordered the men to return to work.

The International Labor Defense which is conducting the defense of the five workers must develop a broad united front movement for their liberation. Not only the N.M.U. locals which are very weak, but the rank and file of the U.M.W. must be appealed to and asked to participate in the campaign. This is an issue that can be used to strengthen the Left wing movement in the anthracite region if properly handled.  
 
 
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