Vol. 72/No. 23      June 9, 2008

Upwards of 10,000 people, mostly Black workers and students, responded May 13 to the call by Black church leaders to demonstrate against the Norfolk school board’s plans to dump busing for the city’s elementary school system.

The demonstrators chanted and sang as they walked the route to Norfolk City Hall.

The march was the culmination of a year-long struggle led by the Coalition for Quality Education against attempts to reverse the educational gains won by Blacks and against the return to a “neighborhood schools” program.  
 
June 9, 1958
Far from ringing down the final curtain, de Gaulle’s capture of the premiership has only opened France’s turbulent drama of social and political crisis in France.

The French capitalist class agreed to de Gaulle’s overthrow of parliamentary government because it was incapable of getting French imperialism out of its blind alley. This impasse has resulted from the worldwide wave of colonial revolutions. Since World War II French imperialism has lost political control of its Mideast protectorates (Syria and Lebanon), Indo-China (The northern half lost economically as well as politically; in South Viet Nam, French political domination replaced by U.S. influence), Tunisia, and Morocco. For almost four years now it has sought vainly to put down the independence struggle in Algeria.  
 
June 10, 1933
Workers, organized and unorganized, skilled and unskilled, have downed tools and fought bitter battles against starvation wages and worsening conditions in the last few weeks.

In Allentown, Pa. and the neighboring town of Northampton, women and children struck against starvation wage rates. Seven hundred fifty girls struck three shirt factories in Shamokin. Electrical workers of Denver, Colo., won their fight against a wage cut and also received the 30 hour week in a three weeks battle.

Across the river from Washington D.C., unorganized women struck against a 10 percent cut in a shirt factory.

That this ripple of strikes will grow into a wave of gigantic proportion with the efforts to increase industrial production on the present low wage rate is assured.  
 
 
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