Vol. 80/No. 8      February 29, 2016

 

25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

 

March 1, 1991

The onset of the war against Iraq has brought a qualitative increase in attacks on civil liberties and political rights in Britain, Canada, the United States and allied countries.

This fact presents unionists and other defenders of democratic rights in these countries with a big challenge.

The government-employer measures against democratic rights include press censorship; searches and interrogation of airport workers by Canadian police; employer and secret police attempts to intimidate and victimize workers opposed to the war; the arrest and detention of a Palestinian student by U.S. immigration; attempts to frame up Arabs as terrorists; and the arrest and detention by Canadian immigration of an Iraqi couple.

Democratic rights and the ability to exercise them are fundamental to the struggle of working people to defend themselves against the continued government-employer offensive and from the ravages the war in the Middle East will bring.

February 28, 1966

NEW YORK, Feb. 22 — After 20 days of testimony, the prosecution finished the presentation of its case Feb. 18 against the three men accused of assassinating Malcolm X. Yesterday, the defense began with opening statements on behalf of two of the defendants, Norman (3X) and Butler Thomas (15X) Johnson.

William Chance, Butler’s attorney, said that they will prove that Butler was not at the Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965, when Malcolm X was gunned down. Charles Beavers, one of Johnson’s attorneys, said they would show that Johnson was in another county at the time Malcolm X was shot.

At almost all previous meetings held by Malcolm X at the Audubon, uniformed policemen were stationed at the entrance to the building — usually about a half dozen of them. But on this occasion — just a week after Malcolm’s home had been fire-bombed and burned to the ground in such a way that Malcolm and his family were nearly trapped inside — the two policemen were told to conceal themselves.

March 1, 1941

CHICAGO, Feb. 23 — Assembled in the biting wind before the gates of the strike-bound International Harvester Company here, CIO members and sympathizers today heard Mrs. Lucy Parsons, 82 year old widow of Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket martyrs of 1886, urge on the striking workers to finish the fight with the giant International Harvester trust.

Mrs. Parsons reminded the strikers, who have kept the IHC tractor plant shut down tight for three weeks, that her own husband was framed up and sent to the gallows along with four other working class leaders by interests close to the McCormicks, who still are linked with the International Harvester Company and the McCormick plant here.

The 1886 Haymarket meeting into whose ranks provocateurs threw a bomb which killed a number of people and for which Albert Parsons was framed up and hung, was a peaceable meeting called to find a remedy for the bad working conditions of that day, particularly at the McCormick Reaper Plant.  
 
 
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