Chelsea, this article actually I think is a follow-up to our last intro.
So you'll be pleased to know that there's a follow-up already. Starting the year off with a follow-up.
Good. A follow-up and also follow-up on me remembering what the intro was for the last episode.
San Francisco decides killer robots are not a great idea, actually.
Right. Okay, so they had them out there.
We'll get into the story. This one comes from our always favorite Vice News by journalist Aaron Gordon.
Published December 7th, 2022.
In an abrupt reversal amid public outcry, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors has temporarily changed its decision to permit the city's police department to kill people with robots.
Various news outlets reported.
There have been more killings at the hands of police than any other year on record nationwide, since District Supervisor Dean Preston in a statement.
We should be working on ways to decrease the use of force by local law enforcement, not giving them new tools to kill people.
That's an astute point.
Last week, the board voted 8-3 to approve the slate of policies regarding San Francisco police department's use of military grade equipment, including using bond disposal robots to kill people, like the Dallas police did in 2016 with a cornered shooting suspect.
I don't think that came up in the story.
No, I don't think so either. And this one is a little different because this one is with robots, not with people.
Police. Robot police.
Initially, the board did not want to include language allowing the police to kill people with robots, but the San Francisco Police Department amended the language to explicitly allow it.
That's a good guy thing, eh?
Yeah.
That's how you get the public on your side.
Is that how you get around the killings? You make the robots do it?
I guess. Yeah, the San Francisco Police Department hasn't killed anybody. It's those damned robots.
Yeah. So much to do something about that, Link. Oh, and Will.
It is not clear precisely why the board changed its vote over the course of a week, but public outcry on the local, national and international level seems to have played a major part.
The board's vote was highly criticized by news outlets from around the world, from local privacy and civil rights groups that had already organized around another board of supervisors vote to commit the San Francisco Police Department to access live video surveillance and private cameras.
On Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and 44 Community Groups signed a letter opposing the policy, which argued there is no basis to believe that robots coding explosives might be an exception to police overuse of deadly force.
Using robots that are designed to disarm bombs to instead deliver them is a perfect example of this pattern of escalation and of the militarization of the police force that concerns so many across this city.
The coalition has also held a protest at City Hall on Monday.
It looks like that protest has worked over the vote reversal is not permanent.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the issue is being sent back to the Rules Committee, which will debate the topic further.
Matthew Guariglia, policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a statement, the fight is not over.
Quote, should the Rules Committee revisit the issue, the community must come together to stop the dangerous use of technology.
End quote. And that's the end of the article. If anything more comes of it, I think this is one we'll probably keep an eye on, because it really seems like the cops want to murder people with explosive robots and everybody else doesn't want to be murdered by explosives.
No, nobody would want to be. Who wouldn't want to use robots to murder people? But I mean, I would fight against it.
I feel like if that was a choice on death row, somebody would pick it.
Yeah.
Exploding death robots.
That's such a good point. Maybe you should write to the debate team about that so they can debate that because somebody obviously just wants to use the death robots.
Well, I don't think executions are legal in California, so that one would have to probably go to Texas.
There's somebody that's trying to sell them. They can just send their door to door salesmen selling killer robots to the next state over.
I'm sure there's a warden who would pick it up pretty quick.
Yeah.
That's smooth talking, warden.
Yeah, and then that gets rid of the who actually killed that person on death row. It was the robot, not any human that has to live with it because they're always so concerned about that.
Actually, you know what? The military companies might be OK with that press.
It's good press.
Well, I don't know if I say it's good. It is press.
But I know that they run into problems because they use a cocktail of toxic pharmaceuticals to kill people on death row right now, which no pharmaceutical company wants their name attached to it at all.
So it's actually very hard to get a supply for it.
Yeah, I'm surprised of that because pharmaceutical companies are evil.
Yeah, but there's no money in it because there's so few death row deaths every year.
Hopefully we have some higher up listeners in the murderous robots industry because we just problem solve for them.
Like I said, if you had like a checklist of like, how do you want to be killed on death row?
Murderous exploding robot probably would be checked off at least a couple of times.
I would choose it. But do they get a choice of how they die?
I think for a while they did because I distinctly remember somebody choosing firing squad not that long ago because he had been on death row for so long.
Wouldn't pick that. I mean, choice of last meal. Yes. How you die.
I'm sure. And with that, let's get into this episode.
From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, the first linear choose your own adventure podcast out there.
Some people may say that you always have at least two choices.
I don't like that idea of people turning us off before the episode's over.
So you only have the one choice of riding it through the end.
We are your choosing host, Taylor and Chelsea, here today talking about strikes that have brought us to where we are in the workplace world.
When it comes to unionization, when it comes to our workers rights,
no matter what country you're in, you have some badass ancestors that really had to fight for what happened.
And this is a continuation of a previous episode that we have done on this subject where we're going to talk about violent strikes.
Now, Chelsea and I have each looked at a different strike.
Chelsea's is a bit more than just one. I believe it's kind of a nationwide one.
It went. I don't think so. Did you do the Vancouver one?
Yeah. OK, well, it happens in other studies, too. Just not that much.
OK, because I OK, so Chelsea has covered a part of one of the strikes.
I'm going to go first just because I think chronologically this one makes more sense.
Let's sit and see what happens.
I'm going to leave you in suspense as to what happens to the workers at the end of what is called the Thibodeaux massacre.
OK, I'm going to sit here and worry about what I didn't do.
OK, don't worry, I haven't read that much on them.
So before I begin, I just want to talk.
I took a lot of what I'm going to cover from Wikipedia, as well as the Smithsonian had a really good article on it
that pulled a lot from a book called the Thibodeaux Massacre, Racial Violence in the 1887 Sugarcane Labor Strike by John DeSantis.
And that's where everything I'm going to cover comes from, as well as it's really heavy workers rights, heavy libcom.org had a good article on.
This happens just after the Civil War in the US, like within the decades following it.
So the Civil War ends 1865, the 13th Amendment is passed and it brought freedom to the slaves.
However, it doesn't technically end slavery because it specifically says that slavery is still OK as punishment for a crime.
Yeah, slavery is still technically legal in the States.
If you're a prisoner, you can be a slave. They don't have to pay you.
Oh, right. So it's technically still legal.
Oh, yeah, it definitely is.
I didn't think of it that way.
You would think this brought great rights to African-Americans all throughout the US,
while your mileage varies really depending on where you were.
And even then, Jim Crow really ruined a lot of stuff.
It might come up a bit, but we're going to continue on with this part of the story.
We're going to talk about sugarcane cutters working in Louisiana.
They were living basically what would barely be distinguishable from slavery, at least argued by John DeSantis in his book, The Thibodeaux Massacre.
They did not own or rent land. Workers and their families lived in old slave cabins.
So they didn't move. They have no money. It's indistinguishable from slavery.
The toiling gangs, just like their ancestors had for nearly a century, growers gave workers meals,
but paid famine wages, many as little as 42 cents per day, which ends up in 2017 monies to be 91 cents per hour, 12 hour shifts.
And this is after the Civil War ended. So this is outside of slavery.
Before they weren't getting paid at all, but they were food and board.
In many, if not most cases, workers instead of cash received what is called strip.
So instead of getting 42 cents a day, they got 42 cents in strip.
This is like money, except you can only spend it in one place, the company store.
It's just like a thing that keeps happening. You talked about that in the last straight.
The company store comes up a lot. Yeah.
And even today, technically a lot of people, their bonuses, they get paid out in company gift cards,
which then you can only use at the store that you work at.
So I feel like I don't know a whole lot about strikes, but I feel like I know where this is going.
They had to find out. They had to find out this wasn't a good idea.
OK, are you going to? We're going to keep going.
Yeah, you could only spend these at the plantation stores where the plantation owners could charge whatever they wanted.
Most stores would normally mark up items at least 100 percent.
You can see that workers usually wound up being indebted to the planter because they didn't get paid anything and things cost way too much.
So they had to take out a debt to the employer.
And Louisiana State Law stated that if a worker owed money to a planter, he could not move off the planter's land until the debt was paid.
So the law essentially reduced the plantation laborers to serfs.
They were just indebted to the Lord and couldn't leave.
I don't like this at all.
But they did have some advantages to their counterparts in the plantations where cotton was grown.
Planters needed intensive labor on the sugar canes and growers living on thin margins failed to attract migrant workers to replace local workers,
especially in the crucial rolling season when the sugar cane would be cut down and then pressed for its juices, which is it's a lot more labor intensive than cotton.
So you actually need somebody who knows what they're doing and is willing to work those heavy heavy days in the sugar parishes,
arcing through the southern parts of the states from Berwick Bay to the Mississippi River.
African-American men also voted at this time.
The Republican Party, which supported black civil rights, was stronger in sugar country than anywhere else in the state.
Following the end of the Civil War, African-Americans became legislators or sheriffs and black volunteer militias drilled despite living in working conditions, still bearing the marks of slavery.
Just so we're all on the same page here, it's going to sound weird.
But the Republican Party at this time is the Republican Party of Lincoln.
Very pro workers rights and very pro racial relations.
So it does care about the African-American community, most communities, in fact, of color.
Good. Now I'm on the same page.
There's a change that happens in the future, but Republican does come up a lot.
Kind of funny, actually, there's a hundred year gap after Lincoln for a Republican to kind of come back into power.
Interesting.
In the South.
Does it have to do with the story?
It comes up in the story, actually.
In 1874, nine years after slavery ended in the United States, the cane cutters demanded what they called a second emancipation.
They wanted living wages or at least the chance to rent on shares, which I think means share in the crop harvest, whatever the profits would be on it.
I couldn't find exactly what they meant.
It was something in the Smithsonian Web site's article.
And the only thing I could find on rent on shares is literally shorting stock, which I don't think was happening at the time for the African-American community.
So I think what they're talking about is being able to participate in the profits of their labor.
OK, let's go with that.
Yeah.
Planters wanted to cut wages after there was lean harvest in the 1873 and 1874 harvest seasons, which coincided with an economic recession.
And while Louisiana growers produced 95 percent of the nation's domestic sugar and molasses, they were losing market shares to cheaper foreign sugars.
Sensing that they were in a strong bargaining position, workers banded together in several sugar parishes, including St. Mary, Iberia, Terrebonne and La Forche,
demanding cash wages of $1.25 a day or a dollar if meals are included.
That's pretty it's pretty high compared to what they're getting now.
Yeah, they basically say triple our pay.
What is a sugar parish?
So parishes are basically like counties in Louisiana.
Sugar county. Yeah.
OK. I think that's how I was understanding it.
Parishes are kind of a religious thing.
So everything that came up on parishes was about the religious area.
So my mind is just like the county.
That's at least how I justified it to myself.
Now we all must.
So they came to them and said, hey, look, you're paying us 40 cents a day.
It's in script. Pay us at least a buck twenty five a day or give us meals in a dollar, which I don't think that's all that high.
Still, like, I think that's maybe two dollars an hour today's money.
OK, that's where my disconnect was. I wasn't sure.
I thought it was a lot more because again, remember, they're getting about 41 cents for the day,
which turns into about 90 cents an hour.
And then we're basically tripling it.
So they're going up to about 250.
OK, no, that's course.
Growers refused, upset that African-American workers were demanding an end to their paternalistic work regime.
So African-American leaders like Kamp Keys, a former Terrebonne parish legislator, called a strike.
Keys had a march from Houma to Southdown Plantation in Terrebonne, rallying workers with a fiery speech.
The sight of black protesters riled growers and acting with this interest in mind,
the parish's African-American sheriff formed a posse of whites to face down strikers.
Surprised at the opposition, Keys marches retreated.
Nothing happens with that strike attempt.
And then some things happen in the state capital of New Orleans, which moved to Baton Rouge in 1882.
So technically New Orleans capital at this point.
Republican Governor William Pitt Kellogg also backed growers,
but he was under siege from the Louisiana White League, a paramilitary white supremacist group formed in 1874
to intimidate the Republicans and keep African-Americans from voting.
Despite Kellogg's being a pro-growth moderate who favored low taxes,
white leaguers tried to oust him in a violent coup.
The Battle of Liberty Place, as it was called, pitted white militia men against federal troops and metropolitan police.
And this was the last major event of violence stemming from the disputed 1872 gubernatorial election,
after which both the Democrat John McHenry and Republican William Pitt Kellogg claimed victory.
Five thousand members of the White League, a paramilitary terrorist organization made up largely Confederate veterans,
fought against the outnumbered New Orleans metropolitan police and state militia.
The insurgents held the state house, armory and downtown for three days,
retreating before arrival of federal troops that restored the elected government.
No insurgents were charged in any action, and he returned under guard,
but would be Louisiana's last Republican governor for more than 100 years.
I just wanted to include that because I did not know that story at all.
I thought that was an interesting little side.
Didn't come up in the story except for the term the Battle of Liberty Place.
So I wanted to look up what was the Battle of Liberty Place.
So they're both against the workers in this situation,
but the Republican is at least in theory or media would have purported them to be in favor of the black workers here.
So just kind of added fuel to the fire, but he was against it because of all the things that were going on.
People hate the workers.
Yes. At this time as well, America was retreating from Republican led reconstruction and abandoning civil rights.
African Americans in sugar regions kept the right to vote, but their influence in state elections was waiting.
As W.E.B. DuBois put in Black Reconstruction in America,
the slave went free, stood for a brief moment in the sun and then moved back into slavery.
In October of 1877, Duncan F. Kenner, a millionaire planter,
founded the statewide Louisiana Sugar Producers Association, the LSPA,
consisting of 200 of the largest planters in the state and served as president.
The powerful LSPA lobbied the federal government for sugar tariffs,
funding to support levies to protect their lands and research to increase crop yields.
For the next decade, these members also worked to gain control of their labor.
They adopted a uniform pay scale and withheld 80% of all wages of workers until the end of the harvest season
in order to keep workers on the plantation through the end of the season.
So they've actually lost rights as these plantations come together.
And what's basically called a monopsy, when there's only one buyer, it's a monopsony.
When there's only one seller, it's a monopoly.
So because they're all agreeing we're not going to pay anything higher, they've locked in all their labor at slave wages.
And not only that, you don't even get paid your slave wages until the end of the season.
So you're taking on debt the entire time to the company store as well.
See, I did not know that term because there's not a game about it.
That's a good point. Somebody should make a monopsony game.
Yeah, and then it would be like more people would understand and know to avoid this probably.
So after that happened, sugar workers attempted another strike in 1880,
and both growers and workers resorted to sporadic violence.
African-Americans were being disarmed and thrown out of office,
and some were leased out for hard labor for petty and trumped up crimes.
With few options available, by 1887, tarabon sugar workers reached out to the Knights of Labor.
Now, the Knights of Labor, I think came up in our last strike episode
because they were the biggest union in the US until the late 1880s.
I don't remember them.
It's been a year, so I can't quite remember.
They came up in one of the train strikes, which I think is actually pretty much all we did outside of that cold strike.
The Knights were the biggest and most powerful union in America at the time,
and it began organizing African-American workers in 1883 in separate locals.
Local is a bargaining unit of a broader union.
Despite segregation, the Knights organized women and farm workers,
and it made strides against Jim Crow at the Knights 1886 convention in Richmond, Virginia.
Leaders risked violence by insisting that a Black delegate introduce Virginia's segregationist governor,
which I think is a really progressive thing, but probably pissed a lot of people off at the time.
It seems a lot of this stuff is.
Across the states of the former Confederacy,
whites viewed organized labor as agitation that threatened the emerging Jim Crow order.
Even in the North and Midwest, the Knights fought an uphill battle against authorities who sided with railroad miners.
Several states called out militias to break strikes during the late 19th century,
but the Knights was at its peak of popularity in the 1880s.
So naturally, this is the group that the workers were working with.
The Knights of Labor helped to bring together many different types of people from all different walks of life.
For example, Catholic and Protestant Irish-born workers.
The Knights of Labor appealed to them because they worked very closely with the Irish Land League.
The Knights had a mixed record on inclusiveness and exclusiveness, however.
They accepted women and Blacks and their employers as members,
and advocating the admission of Blacks into local assemblies.
However, the organization tolerated the segregation of the settlers in the South.
Bankers, doctors, lawyers, stockholders, and liquor manufacturers were excluded
because they were considered unproductive members of society, and Asians were also excluded.
And in 1885, a branch of the Knights in Tacoma, Washington,
violently expelled the city's Chinese workers, who amounted to nearly a tenth of the overall city's population at the time.
The Union Pacific Railroad came into conflict with the Knights when the Knights in Wyoming refused to work more hours in 1885,
and the railroad hired Chinese workers as strikebreakers to stir up racial animosities.
The result is the Rock Springs massacre that killed scores of Chinese workers and drove the rest out of Wyoming.
I think that's going to be next year's episode.
In Louisiana, the Knights organized sugar workers into seven locals of 100 to 150 members each.
In August of 1887, the Knights met with St. Mary branch of the Louisiana Sugar Planters Association, asking for improved wages.
And again, the growers refused.
So the Knights raised the stakes in October of 1887, as the rolling season approached.
It's really important that we understand this process.
You harvest sugar cane, you have to do it by hand.
It's basically like harvesting a bamboo field.
You got to cut it down.
You take the stalks into a factory and they need to be pressed and refined to their sugar product fast because they rot really fast.
And that's why they're saying if we can do this at harvest time, we're going to have the most impact.
That makes sense.
So the Knights raised the stakes in October of 1887, as the rolling season approached.
Junius Bailey, a 29 year old school teacher, served as local president in Terrebonne.
His office sent a communique all over the region, asking for a dollar twenty five a day cash wages and local workers committees followed up, going directly to growers with the same demand.
But instead of bargaining, growers fired union members.
Planters like future Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Douglas White kicked workers off the land, ordering any who stayed arrested, siding with the growers.
And Democratic newspapers circulated false reports of black on white violence.
Quote, the most vicious and unruly set of Negroes, unquote, were at the Rainsy Plantation near Thibodeau.
And the New Orleans Daily, Pekeun, reported.
I don't know how to say that.
Quote, the leader of them said today that no power on earth could remove them unless they were moved as corpses.
Unquote.
On November 1st, workers in St.
Mary, Laforge and Terrebonne parishes refused to work and refused to vacate their cabins that were plantation owned.
Attempts to evict the tenants by local sheriffs were unsuccessful.
The sugar planters were faced with the possibility of losing their crops to a freeze if the strike persisted.
And on the same day the strike began, the Planters Association called on the governor to send them help in the form of the state militia.
Democrat McHenry, who was part of that battle earlier on the losing side, but he was elected at that time,
who is also a former planter, obliged calling for the assistance of several all white Louisiana militias under the command of ex Confederate General PGT Beauregard.
One group toted a 45 caliber Gatling gun, which is a hand cranked machine gun, around two parishes before parking it in front of the Thibodeau courthouse.
An army cannon was set up in front of the jail.
In St.
Mary, the Atacapis Rangers joined a sheriff's posse facing down a group of Black strikers.
When one of the workers reached into a pocket, posse members opened fire on the crowd and four men were shot dead where they stood, a newspaper reported.
Terror had broke the strike in St.
Mary's Parish.
In neighboring Terrebonne, some small growers came to the bargaining table, but larger planters hired strikebreakers from Vicksburg, Mississippi,
200 miles to the north, promising high wages and bringing them down on trains.
Replacement workers were also African-Americans, but they lacked experience in cane breaks.
As they arrived, militiamen evicted strikers.
And these are some of the headlines that are coming out around this at the time.
Very slanted, a New Orleans newspaper reported that, quote,
For three weeks past, the Negro women of the town have been making threats to the effect that if the white men resorted to arms, they would burn the town and end the lives of white women and children with their cane knives.
Unquote.
Similarly, in the days leading up to the climatic events in Thibodeau, it was reported that, quote,
some of the colored women made open threats against the people in the community, declaring that they would destroy any house in the town and that not a few of the Negroes boasted that in case a fight was made,
they were fully prepared for it.
End quote.
It's kind of bothering how easily they can talk about this stuff back in the day, but it really was a different time.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking about everything that's going on.
This was definitely a way different time for all of this stuff to be happening and paving the way for things.
So the militia companies sent to the region worked with local judges and evicting strikers from plantations, provided protection for scabs sent in to replace the strikers.
When striking plantation workers were faced with soldiers armed with Springfield rifles, they offered little to no resistance.
They heeded the orders to leave the plantations.
Many congregated in the black section of the city of Thibodeau.
Problems arose when white scabs were fired upon in Terrebonne Parish.
Strikers who were forced off plantations were believed to be involved in the firing into Sugar Mills and La Forche Parish as well.
These are all unconfirmed.
Again, nobody knows what happened for sure.
And there's a lot of that hearsay evidence going around at this time.
Yeah, that's unfortunate that we don't know exactly.
During all this, Thibodeau in La Forche Parish was becoming a refuge for displaced workers.
Some moved into vacant houses in town while others camped along bayous and roadsides.
Reports circulated of African-American women gossiping about a planned riot.
Violence broke out in nearby Lockport on Bayou La Forche when Moses Pugh, a black worker, shot and wounded Richard Foray, a planter and self-defense.
A militia unit arrived and mounted a bayonet charge on gathered workers firing a volley into the air.
At this time, the strike began gaining national attention.
Quote, do the working men of the country understand the significance of this moment?
As Washington, D.C.'s national Republican pointing out that sugar workers were, quote, forced to work starvation wages in the richest spot under the American flag, unquote.
If forced back to the fields at gunpoint, no wage worker was safe from employer intimidation.
In Thibodeau La Forche, Paris district Judge Taylor Beatty declared martial law.
Like many top-ranking white state officials, Beatty was an ex-Confederate and former slaveholder.
He was a former member of the Knights of the White Camellia, a terrorist group that had worked to suppress black Republican voting during Reconstruction.
He authorized local white vigilantes to barricade the town, identifying strikers and ordered blacks within the city limits to show passes to enter or leave.
The people that were enforcing this were white members of the community and neighbouring communities.
They were no doubt horrified by the rumours spreading that the blacks in the town intended to burn the city down.
On Monday, November 21st, two black men had been shot.
A man named Watson died and the second man, Morris Page, was wounded.
Judge Beatty, after this, ordered the paramilitary to close the entrance to the city on the morning of November 22nd in Stangard.
This is where the events really start.
On Wednesday, November 23rd, before dawn, there were pistol shots coming from a cornfield and two white guards were shot.
The two white guards do survive, but the incident enraged the white population of Timidum.
After these two white guards were shot and wounded, a local volunteer company, the Clay Knoblok Guards, went to the scene and they also claimed to have been fired upon from ambush.
They reportedly returned fire and fatally shot six blacks and wounded four others and captured several loaded shotguns.
Quote, there were several companies of white men and they went around night and day shooting coloured men who took part in the strikes, said Reverend T. Jefferson Rhodes of the Moses Baptist Church in Timidum.
Going from house to house, gunmen ordered Jack Conrad, a Union Civil War veteran, his son Grant and his brother-in-law Marcelin, out of their house.
Marcelin processed that he was not a striker but was shot and killed anyways.
As recounted in John DeSantis' book, Clarice Conrad watches her brother Grant got behind a barrel and the white men got behind the house and shot him dead.
Jack Conrad was shot several times in the arms and chest. He lived and later identified one of the attackers as his previous employer.
One strike leader found in an attic was taken to the town common, told to run and then shot to pieces by a firing squad.
An eyewitness told a newspaper that no less than 35, quote, Negroes were killed outright, including old and young men and women. Quote, the Negroes offered no resistance, they could not, as the killing was unexpected, unquote.
Survivors took to the woods and swamps, killings continued on plantations and bodies were dumped in a site that became a landfill.
Absolutely no idea how many people at the end of the day were massacred. It's anywhere from 30 to 300 black strikers that were killed.
This is not a great story.
No. A New Orleans black newspaper, The Daily Pelican, described the scene as thus, quote,
Six killed and five wounded is what the Daily Papers here say.
But from eyewitnesses to the whole transaction, we learned that no less than 35, fully 30 Negroes, have sacrificed their lives in the riots on Wednesday.
Negroes were killed outright, lame men and blind women shot, children and hoary headed grandsires ruthlessly swept down.
The Negroes offered no resistance, they could not, as the killings were unexpected.
Those of them not killed took the woods and the majority of them finding refuge in the city.
The city being New Orleans.
In the same account, the newspaper claimed that the two pickets who were shot, those two white guards that were shot at the beginning, who started this whole thing, were shot by other white guards.
Members of a state militia company from Shreveport, supposedly to create a pretext to initiate the wholesale slaughter of the black strikers.
However, this could not be confirmed and the Shreveport state militia company had apparently left the Bideaux a few days earlier, so I'm not sure what actually happened.
That story would make sense, but nobody knows.
We can't say nobody knows.
Yeah.
So after all that, workers returned to the fields on growers terms while whites cheered a Jim Crow victory.
The Daily Pican blamed black unionizers for the violence, saying that they provoked white citizens, suggesting the strikers, quote, would burn the town and end the lives of white women and children with their cane knives.
Flipping the narrative, the paper argued, quote, it was no longer a question of against labor, but one of law-abiding citizens against assassins, end quote.
The union died with the strikers and the assassins went unpunished.
There was no federal inquiry and even the coroner's inquest refused to point a finger at the murderers.
Sugar planter Andrew Price was among the attackers that morning.
He won a seat in Congress the next year.
Oh.
The massacre helped keep unions out of the South at just the moment it was industrializing.
Textile manufacturers were moving out of New England, chasing low wages.
And after textile factories closed in the 20th century, auto manufacturers and energy companies opened in the Southern states in part for their non-union workforce.
Southern black farm workers would not attempt to unionize again until the 1930s when the Southern Tenant Farmers Union attracted both white and African-American members.
But it too was met by a violent racist backlash.
The struggle for Southern unions continued into the civil rights era.
On the night before he was assassinated in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech supporting striking sanitation workers.
He urged his audience to quote, give ourselves to the struggle until the end.
You may not be on strike, but either we go up together or we go down together, end quote.
And that's the end of the Thibodeaux massacre.
Basically the reason why unions never took hold in the Southern US.
I'm just trying to wrap my head around this.
Obviously there's more workers in general.
Yeah, they have the people on their side.
Yeah. So I just don't understand like this is all horrible.
Why people just go back to work?
Well, they don't really have a choice.
They had so many people murdered.
Oh, because they're slaves.
Well, they're not slaves, but there's the underlying coercion of our system where you need to earn money to be able to survive.
Right. Okay. So technically...
They're wage slaves. To add a word and make it easier.
That makes sense.
So while there's more of them, the people paying their wages still hold the power because they're paying their wages.
Exactly. And these are people who had just come out of slavery.
They don't have educations.
They can't do anything else other than work the farms.
And this is where their families are. It costs money to move.
Yeah. Okay. That's what I was just confused about.
And that's why they call it the Thibodeaux massacre.
Yeah. It makes sense.
Yeah. That's a heavy story.
I am sorry for putting that all on you, everybody,
but I think it's actually an interesting way to kind of learn about the history of why unionization never took hold in the Southern US.
And it continues on for 100 years after that.
I would have otherwise been oblivious to all of this.
Even the fact that they couldn't unionize the South.
Well, they have in the Southern States, a lot of them, what's called the right to work,
where you can't be compelled to pay union fees just because there's a vote in your workplace to unionize.
So you get all the benefits of an employee who's playing union dues.
Without having to pay union dues because you can't be compelled to pay them.
So it really undermines unions.
That's all the power in the unions.
Well, part of the power in the unions comes from being able to collect funds for various reasons,
like paying people to negotiate on your behalf, set up a strike fund in case a strike ever happens,
a few other things as well.
And without collecting that money, especially everybody participating, paying that money,
it really hollows out people who want to pay that money.
Anyhow, go ahead with your story.
I think we spent enough on that. It's too sad.
Okay. I'll prepare for a fun version of this because I don't know a whole lot about strikes or unions.
I've never been a part of a union.
I get their importance.
Like I get the general vague idea of why they're important,
especially listening to all these strikes about workers being treated unfairly.
I get that. The other stuff I don't get.
So be prepared for my relaying of these stories for you.
If you have any questions about union terms, just ask,
because there's a few that likely will come up that I can explain fairly easily,
but not necessarily all of them.
Uh, I don't know that they come up.
Anyhow.
Okay. Well, it's a general strike.
So that means it's like the entire city is striking all the workers in the city.
Okay. Yeah. I didn't think that was a term, but okay.
Let's go.
August 2nd, 1918, a day we will never forget.
Day of the first general strike in Canadian history,
which means the whole city strikes.
Didn't know that.
Why do we care?
Well, assume Taylor will tell us.
No, we're going to tell you right now with the story.
Oh, good.
It's-
I hope.
As I was saying, the infamous day we have all ingrained in our minds,
the second day of August, 1918.
There had been talks for a while before this day for hundreds, maybe thousands of hours.
I actually don't know how long the article was super vague
and just said there had been talk.
It had been five minutes.
It's a perfect storm for the first general strike in Canadian history.
There was federal conscription, which I didn't know that Canada had.
Yeah. And the first world war.
Yeah. I had no idea.
Censorship of socialist publications and demand for higher wages,
all of which no one was fond of.
No one likes socialist censorship.
Let's beg him for a strike.
If I've listened to our episode before.
Wartime inflation reduced real income, which I learned is the income of peoples
after adjusting for inflation.
This happened throughout the first world war
and in addition Vancouver shipbuilders experienced labor shortages.
The storm was a Bruin.
To add to the storm a Bruin,
numerous government policies had suppressed the work of labor activists,
such as strikes, lockouts, and certain presses being banned.
Workers were inspired by the Bolshevik revolution, of course,
which happened the previous year.
So if we add this all together,
it's just like a shit storm tornado heading towards Vancouver,
I guess, in the form of a general strike.
It's foreshadowing right there.
Strike was organized as a one day political protest.
I wouldn't say that that is foreshadowing.
Yeah, I just foreshadowed the shit out of that.
By saying what it was.
Okay.
It was the tornado.
Okay, the strike was organized as a one day political protest
after the killing of the draft evader Albert Ginger.
Well, someone died because he dodged the draft in Canada.
Okay, so because of this, I had no idea.
First of all, most people from the States
always talk about going to Canada to avoid the draft.
Oh, I was like, whoa, who is this guy?
Turns out he's a pretty important guy in the story.
So I'm really glad I looked into him
because the first article I looked like just kind of brushed him off of this guy.
But I was intrigued by Ginger.
It turns out he was a trade unionist,
was a coal miner and advocate for workers' rights
and promoted the cause of unions in British Columbia, Canada,
where Vancouver is.
I'm also there.
Fingered by the working conditions in coal mines,
Goodwin sought to increase wages and improve working conditions
and fought companies that disregarded workers' rights.
He participated in and led multiple strikes
and served as a delegate for the British Columbia Federation of Labour
as an organizer for the Socialist Party of Canada.
In the years following his increased activism
and involvement with labour unions,
Goodwin fell under scrutiny for his opposition
to military conscription during World War I
and he was very outspoken about the war.
He was a very outspoken opponent of the war.
He wasn't any better than what I said.
Like many coal miners, Ginger suffered lung problems
and was initially classified as unfit for fighting overseas.
However, following a strike he led for the eight-hour day
at a smelter in Trail, BC, his conscription status
was changed to fit for service in an overseas fighting unit.
They heard him belting out those pro-socialist views
and said those lungs are just fine for fighting.
They're fine for fighting and he could do more service, I guess, fighting
and never coming home.
And not rising up the lower class too.
Yeah, we don't want to do that.
With the help of townspeople, he traveled to Vancouver Island
and went into hiding in a bush near Cumberland
where other war resistors received support from local community members.
The series of still-contested events, Ginger, they keep calling him Goodwin,
but Ginger is what drew me to him in the first place.
Is that a nickname? Is he a redhead?
He is.
I was gonna ask you, but I just felt like it was a given. Anyone named Ginger is a redhead.
Goodwin was tracked down on July 27, 1918
and shot by a private constable employed by the Dominion Police,
which is the forerunner of the RCMP, the evil RCMP.
Just kidding. No, they are.
Those force boys have been up to everything for a long time.
Just four days after an amnesty had been declared for draft evaders.
There is debate on whether Ginger was a victim of murder
or if his death was the result of the officer's self-defense.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it wasn't in self-defense.
That's my opinion.
In any event, the self-defense wasn't necessary
if they had just known the fucking law at the time
because he was not evading at the time.
I mean, I guess technically communications didn't travel that fast in 1918
when you're hiding in the bush.
Really didn't, no, in Canada.
So there are those that say that Ginger was hunted down and killed
by the police officer for his union activism.
And Ginger's death sparked a one-day general strike.
Oh no, I'm foreshadowing again.
Okay, I'm just gonna say.
You're so quick.
Ginger's death sparked a one-day general strike in Vancouver
on August 2, 1918, the most infamous day in Canadian history.
We all know that date.
I'm really glad I decided to look into Ginger after that whole thing
because this essentially started the great...
Yeah, honestly, he sounds kind of like a Canadian version of Eugene Debs
that ended up in jail and running for president in the US,
running as president as a socialist and getting a million votes.
Yeah, I'm glad you continued on to say who Eugene Debs was.
Yeah, he spoke out against the First World War
just being a very high-class affair,
and it was all the workers that were going out to be murdered.
And he said, this is the stupidest thing ever and got put to jail for that.
Yeah, it is the stupidest thing ever and they're just speaking their truth.
Sad, just like the story you told.
Yeah, I didn't personally know Ginger,
but I feel like he would have been satisfied with the results
that his death had triggered based on his hobbies and interests.
I guess I didn't finish my sentence with the first mention of Ginger.
So the strike was organized as a one-day political protest
after the killing of the draft evader Albert Ginger Goodwin.
Did I just change his first name?
Call him Ginger.
Yeah, his name's Albert.
I was just used to calling him Ginger.
Oh, after the killing of Ginger,
it previously called for a general strike
in case any worker was drafted against their will.
Okay, so the strike is going down now.
What I've so nicely foreshadowed for you.
It's happening.
The strike is met with violence.
People who are not in the strike hate the strike, as we know.
People who aren't striking hate the strike.
The violence happening is from return soldiers
who had been mobilized and supplied with vehicles to storm the labor temple
at 411 Dunsmear Street.
And what the fuck is a labor temple?
What is the term I need help with?
I don't actually know.
I would assume that's just kind of like a lodge
where people would hang out and like do their union stuff.
Yeah, it kind of sounds like Scientology's,
but I Googled it and I could not find an answer.
Huh, there's a Finnish labor temple and a Ukrainian labor temple.
Yeah, you can bring up all the labor temples,
but it doesn't tell you what they are.
Huh.
So it's very mystical and mysterious, a labor temple.
So if anyone's ever been in one, been around one.
So the Ukrainian labor temple was a focus for Ukrainian culture
and worker and farmer political activism.
So I think it was just a place for like the blue collars
to have like cultural events and to push forward their political activism.
That's my guess.
I don't really see those anymore.
No, you don't at all.
It didn't come up. It didn't come up.
But I feel like there's been a big push against labor and along for many decades.
It's true. It's in a different place these days.
Even the episodes that we've done.
Okay, that's labor temporal.
It's still gray.
Some opposition claim that the strike was a product of a Bolshevik conspiracy.
That's right.
Right here in Canada, our home and native land, Bolshevik conspiracy.
300 men ransacked the office of the Vancouver trades and labor council
after attempting to throw the secretary, Victor Miggly, mid Miggly out of a window.
Soldiers forced the longshoremen to kiss the union jack.
They must have failed to throw him out the window.
Okay, here we go.
A woman working in the office was badly bruised when she prevented
Miggly from being thrown out the window.
So it seems like if she was just bruised, they didn't try that hard.
Strike leaders could point to the vote from the Vancouver trades and labor council
delegates that supported the strike 17 to one.
After the strike in response to opposition from the business and middle class,
all the strike leaders resigned.
Nearly all were reelected in the ensuing election,
demonstrating widespread support for the general strike among organized workers.
Although the strike was province wide,
it was only the city of Vancouver that reached general strike proportions.
Numerous other strikes took place in the city that year.
The general strike was as much a show of labor strength
as it was political protest over Inder's death.
At the time, the strike was controversial.
Some saw Inder as a martyr.
Did you say that?
Matier?
Yeah, a martyr.
Murder for the labor movement while others saw the strike as a betrayal of Canadian ideals.
Yeah, and that's why they made him kiss the union jack would be because that's
the Canadian flag at the time.
And they would feel that these people were f-dodgers.
And therefore they needed to show respect to the flag, basically.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Although only one day in duration, the strike was an important maker of the Canadian labor revolt
that piqued the Winnipeg general strike the following year.
1919 Vancouver strike in sympathy with Winnipeg
is still the longest general strike in Canadian history.
So that's where I end, but that's where I feel Taylor expected me to keep going
in talking about the Winnipeg general strike.
Next year we can do the Winnipeg general strike because that's the big one.
My brain's not working too good these days.
You know what?
I thought I did a really good job on this.
Yeah.
I found what looks like a pretty good article on Vancouver's labor temple.
So I can just do a bit on that right now.
Okay.
Designed by architect Thomas Hooper, the building opened in spring of 1913 at a cost
of about $150,000 and it included meeting halls, a large billiard room in the basement,
a lounge for unemployed workers, a print shop, a cooperative store to provide low-cost goods
to workers, and offices for Vancouver's trade and labor council, the socialist party and
individual unions.
It was designed so that a couple more floors could be added in case need arose.
The labor temple was a stop for many prominent and sometimes notorious union leaders passing
through town.
Mother Jones, IWW co-founder, Big Bill Heywood and Lucy Parsons, an outspoken widow of Haymarket
riot martyr Albert Parsons are perhaps the most well-known, but it wasn't just radicals
who made use of the labor temple.
The conservative Vancouver police union also got its start there when it became one of
the first police unions in the country in 1918.
Huh.
The rest is about the general strike.
Okay.
It all connects back.
Ultimately, the temple became a casualty of this militant period in Vancouver's labor
history.
A factional split in the VTLC paralyzed its ability to meet the financial obligations
of the labor temple.
Provincial government purchased the building and repurposed it as the first home of Van
Tech High School in 1921.
The province retained ownership until a few years ago when it sold the temple to the current
owners.
Labor's Vancouver temple is now the maritime labor center on Victoria drive and unsightly,
but functional headquarters for the Vancouver district labor council that features a fabulous
1940s mural of Fraser Wilson.
Nice.
I like that it's fabulous.
Huh.
The more you know.
There we go.
Yeah.
It's crazy to know that history of the city you're in though, hey?
There were labor movements in there and it got pretty popular.
Yeah, like I said, when I went into what I was talking about, like this is all stuff
that is kind of like, I understand what a strike is.
I understand what a union is.
I understand their importance, but it's never really come across my desk.
Like how, what came to be in the history of it all behind and the fight that people had
to put up to be able to have even today, we're still always trying to get higher wages and
all that stuff that I'm just not wanting to be able to have.
I'm just not well versed in, but it's interesting to see where it all comes from.
It's good knowledge to have.
Yeah, it really is.
And even when it comes to like the idea of the Bolshevik resolution, we learned that
in school, but we never learned that there were movements within North America.
Some of us learned it in school.
That's true.
Yeah.
But we never learned about the equivalence that did happen or just about happened in
like Western societies around.
No, I don't recall learning about any of that.
And with that knowledge is power and you have reached the end of your mandatory listening
for the day listener.
Thank you for following our rules and listening right to the end.
We have been Journey to the Fringe.
I am Taylor here with Chelsea.
Thank you all for listening and we will see you next week.
Bye.
That was a weird bye.
Bye.
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