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Vol. 74/No. 10      March 15, 2010

 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
March 15, 1985
AMES, Iowa—“The National Crisis Action Rally,” a broadly sponsored farm protest rally, attracted 16,000 farmers and their supporters here February 27. They heard four hours of speeches describing the depth of the farm crisis and urging the federal government to intervene on behalf of family farmers immediately.

People packed the Hilton Coliseum, which was filled with a variety of banners and posters including: “Reagan policy: let them eat cake; No profit, don’t plant; Save the farmer, save your job.”

A number of posters addressed the priorities of the federal budget: “Farms not arms; Grain silos, not missile silos; No more weapons.”  
 
March 14, 1960
After six weeks, the Southern students’ campaign of direct action against Jim Crow is still spreading. At the same time, the conflict with Southern white-supremacist officials and the mobs they have incited has become more bitter.

Sit-down demonstrations at discriminatory lunch counters have erupted in Texas and Kentucky, bringing to nine the total of affected states below the Mason-Dixon line. And on March 9, students from six Negro colleges in Atlanta announced in a full-page newspaper advertisement their intention of making Georgia the tenth.

In a few instances Negroes have won victories and are now being served at formerly lily-white lunch counters and soda fountains.  
 
March 16, 1935
Wall Street’s most important semicolony, Cuba, is now in the throes of a nation-wide general strike. Martial law has been declared. The death penalty has been decreed for all those offering open opposition to the government. The trade unions have been declared dissolved. A great struggle is under way between the workers, professionals and students on the one hand and the agents of American imperialism on the other.

The very narrow social base that Mendieta once had, as with Machado in 1934, has been washed away from under him until his sole supports today are the army under Batista and American imperialism, represented by Jefferson Caffery.  
 
 
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