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Vol. 77/No. 9      March 11, 2013

 
25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

 

March 11, 1988

CAMDEN, Ark.—It was standing room only, as more than 400 unionists and people from the community packed into the paperworkers’ union hall here February 23 for a labor solidarity rally.

International Paper Co. is demanding sweeping concessions from the United Paperworkers International Union and International Association of Machinists locals that organize this mill. Claiming that the mill is old and worn out, IP wants a wage cut, “total flexibility from the front gate to the back gate” to move workers to any job, elimination of premium pay for Sunday work, and more use of outside contractors.

These are similar to demands the company has been making at its mills around the country, including the four where 3,400 workers are on strike or locked out in Jay, Maine; Mobile, Alabama; De Pere, Wisconsin; and Lock Haven, Pennsylvania.

March 11, 1963

GREENWOOD, Miss., March 1—James Travis, a 20-year-old field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee, was gunned last night by three men and is in a hospital in critical condition.

Robert Moses, director of SNCC’s Mississippi voter registration project, and Randolph Blackwell, field director of the Atlanta-based Voter-Education Project, were riding with Travis on a highway outside of Greenwood. Three white men followed them in an untagged white Buick.

The three whites opened fire on the Negroes with pistols. Bullets smashed both front windows. Travis, the driver of the car, shouted that he had been hit.

The shooting was a direct reprisal for SNCC’s voter-registration work. Moses said that 150 Negroes had attempted to register in Greenwood in the two days before the shooting, “the first real breakthrough in Mississippi.”

March 12, 1938

Mr. Alexander F. Kerensky has come to town for a speaking tour. The former Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution, is very indignant and morally outraged over the last Moscow trial. Like so many other “democratic” hacks, he is trying to restore some of his woefully faded prestige by reference to the horrors of Bolshevik dictatorship.

We are not, as is known, among those who believe that support of the Russian Revolution and the leadership of Lenin makes necessary an endorsement of the dreadful atrocities committed by the counter-revolutionary regime of Stalin and Co. Those who have not forgotten the history of the short-lived rule of Mr. Kerensky will hardly condemn Stalin only in order to exchange him for the man and the system that were kicked into oblivion by the revolutionary masses of Russia in November 1917.

 
 
 
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