Today in labor History January 17, 1969: Black Panther Party members Bunchy Carter and John Huggins died in a shootout with the rival black nationalist Organization US, during a meeting at UCLA. The rivalry and antagonism between the two groups was deliberately stoked by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, or counterintelligence program. The FBI even sent counterfeit death threats to members of both organizations, making it look like they originated with the other group.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #blackpanthers #cointellpro #assassination #fbi #ucla #BlackMastadon

Today in Labor History January 17, 1915: Lucy Parsons, anarchist and IWW cofounder, organized and led a hunger march of 1,500 people in Chicago. They carried banners saying, “We want work, not charity,” and “We refuse to starve!” Police attacked them with clubs and shot at them. Amazingly, no one was killed. They also arrested 15, including Parsons, for marching without a permit.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #lucyparsons #hunger #poverty #IWW #police #policebrutality #prison #BlackMastadon

Today in labor History January 17, 1961: The CIA orchestrated a coup that tortured, murdered, and overthrew Congo’s first democratically elected president, Patrice Lumumba. This was after a previous failed coup against him by Mobutu Sese Seku, who would later become dictator from 1971 until 1997.

Congo won independence from Belgium in 1960, after years of brutal colonial rule which slaughtered up to 10 million people, or half its entire population. However, imperial powers continued to exploit the people of Congo, even after independence. President Eisenhower authorized the assassination of Lumumba because of his ties with the Soviet Union. The U.S., and its European allies, wanted control over Congo’s resources, particularly its rich uranium deposits, both to fuel their civilian and military nuclear programs, and, in particular, to keep them out of the hands of the Soviet Union, which was allied with Lumumba.

The wonderful 2024 documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” does a really great job of uncovering the concealed history of the 1961 assassination of Lumumba and the coup d’etat in Congo. But it’s really about so much more: Cold War machinations, propaganda, and covert operations; the superpowers’ jockeying for control of puppet regimes and spheres of influence in the global south; the Pan-African movement; racism in the U.S., the Civil Rights movement, and the repression against it; and, of course, jazz music, including tons of interviews and live footage of Lumumba, Ghanian president and revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, activist and writer Andree Madeleine Blouin, Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miriam Makeba, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, surrealist artist Rene Magritte. There’s even a “slumber party” with Fidel Castro at Malcolm X’s home, in New York, after the U.S. authorities convince all the hotels in New York to refuse Castro a place to sleep during a UN conference.

One of the people the CIA used in its early attempts to assassinate Lumumba was chemist Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the agency’s secret MKULTRA mind control program. Gottlieb tried, but failed, to kill Lumumba with poisoned toothpaste. He also tried, and failed, to assassinate Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar and with radioactively poisoned shoes. MKULTRA was a continuation of Nazi mind-control experiments, which utilized mescaline against Jews and Soviet prisoners, hoping it could be exploited as a “truth” serum. The program gave hallucinogenic drugs, like LSD and Mescaline, to 7,000 unwitting U.S. war veterans, as well as many Canadian and U.S. civilians.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #congo #belgium #lumumba #coup #cia #malcomx #fidelcastro #communism #socialism #soviet #russia #ussr #imperialism #nuclear #atomic #coldwar #jazz #mkultra #hallucinogens #colonialism #coldwar #lsd #BlackMastadon

Today in Labor History January 8, 1811: Charles Deslondes led an unsuccessful slave revolt on the east bank of the Mississippi River near present day New Orleans. Around 125 enslaved men marched from sugarcane plantations on the German Coast toward New Orleans, collecting more men along the way. Up to 500 people participated in total, making it the largest slave revolt in U.S. history. On their march, they burned five plantation houses, several sugarhouses, and crops, and they killed two white men. Most were armed with hand tools. However, 95 black people died in confrontations with the militia or by execution in the aftermath. Whites decapitated many of the executed men and displayed their heads on pikes to intimidate other slaves.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #slavery #revolt #uprising #abolition #massacre #racism #neworleans #BlackMastadon

Today in Labor History November 29, 1781: The crew of the British slave ship Zong slaughtered over 130 enslaved Africans. According to the crew, the ship ran low on drinking water after several navigational blunders. Consequently, they threw the insured slaves overboard. However, when the insurers refused to pay, the slavers sued. On appeal, the judges, ruled against the slave trading syndicate, due to evidence that the captain and crew were at fault. Following the first trial, a freed man, Olaudah Equiano, brought news of the massacre to the attention of the anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp, who fought unsuccessfully to have the ship's crew prosecuted for murder. This did increase publicity, stimulating the abolitionist movement. The event led to the passage of the Slave Trade Act 1788, Britain’s first law regulating the slave trade. And in 1791, Parliament prohibited insurance companies from reimbursing ship owners when enslaved Africans were murdered by being thrown overboard.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #slavery #abolition #massacre #racism #BlackMastadon

Today in Labor History October 15, 1966: The Black Panther Party was created by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, in Oakland, California. One of their early core practices was open-carry armed citizen’s patrols monitoring abusive police behavior. They also implemented free breakfast programs and community health clinics, and advocated for revolutionary class struggle. The FBI sabotaged the Panthers through its COINTELPRO and participated in the assassination of Panthers, like Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. In 1969, the Panthers officially declared sexism to be counterrevolutionary and ordered its male members to treat women as equals. In 1970, Huey Newton expressed support for the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the LGBTQ Liberation Movement which, he correctly noted, were subject to much of the same police brutality as were African Americans.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #BlackPanthers #marxism #Revolutionary #fbi #cointellpro #policebrutality #police #policemurder #blm #BlackMastadon

Today in Labor History October 4, 1887: 10,000 Louisiana sugarcane workers went on strike with the Knights of Labor over terrible living and working conditions. Many of the striking workers were bound to the plantations in a status similar to slavery, due to debts they owed the overpriced Company Store, which accepted no cash and only scrip. Bosses would also withhold up to 80% of the workers’ pay until the end of the growing season to ensure that no one quit early. On November 23, the Louisiana Militia, aided by white vigilantes, murdered 60 unarmed black workers during the Thibodaux Massacre. Hundreds were injured, murdered or went missing, including women and children. The massacre ended the strike and any effective effort to organize black cane workers until the 1940s. Democrats in the state passed a series of laws in the wake of the strike that disenfranchised black voters and enforced segregation and Jim Crow.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #knightsoflabor #union #strike #racism #louisiana #jimcrow #massacre #segregation #vigilante #BlackMastadon

Today in Labor History October 2, 1937: Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the execution of Haitians living in the border region of the Dominican Republic, resulting in the genocidal Parsley massacre of up to 35,000 Haitians. Trujillo was obsessed with race. He’d use pancake make-up to lighten his own skin color and hide his Haitian roots. And even so, the wealthy Dominicans still snubbed him for his working-class family origins. One week prior to the massacre, he publicly accepted a gift of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, whose racial theories he clearly embraced. He used racism to distract Dominicans from their poverty, which had been exacerbated by the Great Depression, and by Trujillo’s corrupt rule. Edwidge Danticat’s historical fiction, “The Farming of Bones,” takes place during the time of the massacre.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #massacre #genocide #haiti #dictatorship #hitler #trujillo #racism #fascism #dominicanrepublic #historicalfiction #fiction #books #author #writer #BlackMastadon @bookstadon

Today in Labor History October 2, 1968: The Tlatelolco Massacre occurred in Mexico City. 15,000 students were demonstrating at the Plaza of Three Cultures against the army’s occupation of the University. The army, with 5,000 soldiers and 200 tanks, ambushed the students, opened fire, and killed nearly 300. They also arrested thousands. This occurred ten days before the opening of the Olympics, the same Olympics where Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved-fists in a Black Power salute. The U.S. contributed to the massacre by providing the Mexican military with radios, weapons, ammunition and riot control training. Furthermore, the CIA provided the Mexican military with daily reports on student activities in the weeks leading up to the massacre.

Chilean film maker Alejandro Jodorosky portrayed the massacre in his film “The Holy Mountain” (1973). Chilean author Roberto Bolano referenced it in his 1999 novel, “The Savage Detectives.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #tlatelolco #massacre #mexico #students #olympics #cia #imperialism #robertobolano #racism #protest #film #fiction #historicalfiction #novel #books #film #author #writer #BlackMastadon @bookstadon

Today in Labor History October 1, 1851: 10,000 New Yorkers busted up a police station in Syracuse to free William "Jerry" Henry, a craftsman who was fleeing slavery in the south. He had been arrested by a US Marshall during the anti-slavery Liberty Party's state convention. Citizens of the city stormed the sheriff's office, freed Henry and helped him escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad. There were a lot of abolitionists living in New York, especially in Syracuse, including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and a large number of abolitionist Quakers and Unitarians. Consequently, Syracuse became known as the great central depot on the Underground Railroad. Jerry Rescue Day was celebrated every October 1 in Syracuse, until the start of the Civil War. The annual event included speeches, poetry, music, and organizing against slavery. They also collected funds to keep the Underground Railroad running in central New York.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #slavery #abolition #UndergroundRailroad #frederickdouglass #harriettubman #police #quaker #unitarian #newyork #BlackMastadon