The ruling means that the city will not be able to lay off the Black firefighters strictly according to seniority. Since the Blacks were among the last hired by the department, layoff by seniority would have meant they would have been the first fired. The city’s firefighting force would have remained overwhelmingly white.

However, said the court’s opinion, a lower court acted correctly in setting aside the fire department’s seniority system if that system is “an obstacle to the city of Toledo’s duty to eliminate past discrimination.”

As a net result of the court order, thirty-four people will be rehired.

The victory sets a legal precedent for challenging the discriminatory firing practices of the bosses, by which minorities and women are always last hired and first fired.  
 
April 9, 1956
In another “brink of war” statement, Secretary of State Dulles said, April 3, that “in an emergency in the Middle East” United States forces might be sent into action without authority of Congress.

The Sixth U.S. Fleet is already stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean. Recently, the Eisenhower Administration sent an additional 1,800 Marines to re-enforce it. With the rise of the national independence movement of the Arab peoples, spearheaded by the Egyptian government, U.S., British and French imperialism—the overlords of the area—are getting increasingly itchy to intervene. The oil trusts have huge stakes in the Middle Eastern area and the State Department is ready to sacrifice untold numbers of lives—Arab, Israeli, French, English and American—to prevent the Arab peoples from reclaiming their own oil resources.

U.S. troops are posted all over the world—including the areas where the colonial revolution is at intense pitch. Under these conditions, it is not at all difficult when it suits Big Business’ needs to claim they have been attacked and to precipitate a “police action.”  
 
April 1, 1931
Could victory in a struggle for realizing the six hour work day appear within the realm of practical possibility to the American workers today? The answer must be “Yes.” One need only remember that already in 1922 the United Mine Workers convention, by rank and file pressure, adopted a program of fight for the six hour work day. At this moment within the various conservative railroad unions there is developing a demand for the six hour work day without reduction in pay.

It is, however, primarily as an offensive slogan for the coming rising labor movement that the demand for the six hour work day without reduction in pay assumes its real importance. Secondly, it can become a powerful means of unifying the working masses, employed and unemployed alike, and set them into motion against their class enemy. Thirdly, it corresponds with the working class needs today. Particularly in the industrially highly developed United States has machine production reached such a stage that the very right to live for millions of workers becomes bound up with a drastic reduction of the present working day.  
 
 
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