Today in history

(Sources: Peace Buttons, War Resisters League, and the Peace Center.)

1982

In one of the worst cases of violent union-busting, a fierce battle broke out between the striking employees of Andrew Carnegie’s steel company, and a Pinkerton Detective Agency private army brought on barges down the Monongahela River in the dead of night. Twelve were killed. Henry C. Frick, general manager of the plant in Homestead, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had been given free reign by Carnegie to quash the strike. At Frick’s request, Pennsylvania Governor Robert E. Pattison then sent 8,500 troops to Homestead to intervene on behalf of the company.

Strike at Homestead Mill

1942

In Nazi-occupied Holland, thirteen-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family were forced to take refuge in a secret sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse under threat of arrest and deportation to concentration camp by the Einsatzgruppen (Task Force), a part of the German Gestapo.

1944

Irene Morgan, a 28-year-old black woman, refused to move to the back of the bus eleven years before Rosa Parks. Her appeal, after her conviction for breaking a Virginia law forbidding integrated seating, resulted in a 7-1 Supreme Court decision barring segregation in interstate commerce.

1965
Students try to block troop trains in Berkeley, CA