Hellraisers Journal: From The Liberator: “Strike Violence That Doesn’t Get Into the Newspapers”-Strikers and Families Evicted

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Quote Mother Jones, Powers of Privilege ed, Ab Chp III—————

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday September 13, 1922
Coal Miners and Families Brutally Evicted from Company Towns

From The Liberator of September 1922:

National Coal Strikes, Violent Evictions by Russell, Lbtr p4, Sept 1922

From the United Mine Workers Journal of September 1, 1922:

-Tent Colony of Evicted Miners at Buck Bottom, West Virginia

Tent Colony Bucks Bottom WV, UMWJ p9, Sept 1, 1922

-Families Forming Tent Colony at Gray’s Landing, Pennsylvania

National Coal Strike, Tent Colony Garys Landing PA, UMWJ p11, Sept 1, 1922

-Evicted Miner George Walker of West Brownsville, Pennsylvania, Age 60

National Coal Strike, Evicted Miner George Walker, age 60, UMWJ p14, Sept 1, 1922

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From The Liberator: “Strike Violence That Doesn’t Get Into the Newspapers”-Strikers and Families Evicted”

Hellraisers Journal: “Knight of the Round Belly” by Robert Minor: U. S. Supreme Court Rules Against Nation’s Child Workers

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Mother Jones Quote ed, Suffer Little Children, CIR p10641, May 14, 1915

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday July 1, 1922
“The Knight of the Round Belly” by Robert Minor
-United State Supreme Court Rules Against Nation’s Child Workers

From The Liberator of July 1922:

US Supreme Court re Child Labor Laws, Drawing by Robert Minor, Lbtr p18, July 1922

January 1911, South Pittston Pennsylvania
-Breaker Boys of Pennsylvania Coal Company by Lewis Hine

 The dust was so dense at times as to obscure the view. This dust penetrates the utmost recesses of the boy’s lungs. A kind of slave driver sometimes stands over the boys, prodding or kicking them into obedience.

Breaker Boys, Jan 1911, Lewis Hine

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Hellraisers Journal: From The Liberator: “Alone” by Claude McKay-“There is no wisdom in your ways for me.”

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There is no wisdom in your ways for me.
I walk with you; my mind is far apart.
-Claude McKay
—————

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday June 27, 1922
“Alone”-a Poem by Claude McKay

From The Liberator of June 1922:

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Hellraisers Journal: From The New York Liberator: “The Uncaging of Debs” by Charles P. Sweeney, First Hand Account

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Quote EVD if Crime to oppose bloodshed, AtR p1, Oct 23, 1920—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday February 5, 1922
First Hand Account of the Release of Eugene Debs from Atlanta Penitentiary 

From The Liberator of February 1922:

The Uncaging of Debs

EVD Leaves Prison Dec 25, Waves Hat, Stt Str p1, Dec 31, 1921IT was Christmas morning. By the President’s order a man was to be released from prison in Atlanta some time that day and proceed to Washington-no one seemed to know just when. But at six o’clock we newspaper men were tipped off to go to the warden’s house, where Debs was said to be having his breakfast. We waited. An hour passed and then Debs, in his blue denim prison raiment, was ushered out a side door of the Warden’s house into a car and shot back to prison. We then were certain the President had not succeeded in getting his prisoner past our lines during the night. That was something, for few men have left prison supposedly free under circumstances as mysterious as these which attended the release of Eugene V. Debs. And, perhaps, no handful of reporters ever faced so strange a task as that of watching a prison so the President of the United States couldn’t sneak a prisoner up to Washington without anybody knowing it.

Playing this curious game against Presidential secrecy, we had to chase every car that came from the prison, overtake it, look in, satisfy ourselves Debs was not there, and then return to our station in the road two hundred yards from the prison. And this all morning, until eleven o’clock, when we boarded the train that took Debs to Washington. And this, we learned, was what happened at the prison.

One by one they came to say good-bye to Debs. One man, a hospital patient, fainted in his arms. Sam Moore, the life-term Negro murderer made over by Debs, wept, and Debs kissed him and promised him he would constantly advocate his freedom. Moore has been in prison thirty years, since he was twenty. A lawyer, also a lifer, imprisoned for killing his wife in a fit of drunken jealousy, embraced the man he said was the best friend he ever knew. The way over from the hospital to the great prison building was choked with men in blue denim, all with outstretched hands. There were tears, and there were smiles, according to temperament. Up the corridors they blocked his way, crowded about him, followed him as he advanced. The warden had suspended all rules. All, all, could come to the front. On every tier they rushed forward to the great barred windows of the building that is as broad as a city block. From the outside, out beyond the prison foreground and beyond the gates, those windows now were pictures of bars and faces, faces, faces. Debs reached the end of the corridor by the warden’s office and the big front door. It opened. Then the shout went up, and as Debs was going down the granite steps it resounded through the vast place and carried out over the free air to the ears of those away out in the road.

But it was no longer a shout. For it would not die. It steadily increased in volume. It was twenty-three hundred caged men crying to see the one who was loose. He walked away out over the grass foreground where he could see them all and they could see him. Cheers mingled with fanatical screams, and yells of his name. For a half a minute he stood with his hat high in air. Then his hand fell, then his head and he wept. He walked back to the warden’s automobile, and away he went with the great noise in his ears.

We all got in the train with Debs and rode with him to Washington, and not yet do any of us know why it was that the President of the United States took so great an interest in this man, whom he does not think worthy of the rights of citizenship.

CHARLES P. SWEENEY.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: From the New York Liberator: “What Is Social Equality” by Walter F. White of the N. A. A. C. P.

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Quote Claude McKay, Fighting Back, Messenger p4, Sept 1919

———————-

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday January 4, 1922
Walter F. White on Social Equality and “The Negro Question in America”

From The Liberator of January 1922:

What is Social Equality

Walter F White, The Crisis p219, Mar 1918
Walter F. White

No speech uttered in the past decade on the Negro question in America has created such nation-wide comment as that of President Harding recently at Birmingham in which he declared that there must be complete economic, political, educational and industrial equality between white and colored people in the United States, but there must and can never be any “social equality.” “Men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly,” he said, “against every suggestion of social equality.”

There can be no objection raised to many of the utterances of Mr. Harding on that occasion. Much credit is due him for daring to say them in the South. The one point on which intelligent Americans will question his wisdom is the dragging in of that Southern shibboleth which has been used for a half-century to cover countless lynchings, the robbery and exploitation of nine million Negroes through the peonage system, the nullification to all practical intents and purposes of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, and the denial of common justice to Negroes in the South. That weapon which the South has used so effectively, especially in hoodwinking and gulling the North, is the charge that any Negro who attempts to better his own condition or that of his race is seeking to place himself as a social equal with the white people of that community.

But what is this thing called social equality? Herbert J. Seligmann, in his able analysis of the race question, “The Negro Faces America,” says:

What does the white American mean by social equality? To take the words at their face value, one would suppose he meant association of colored and white persons in the home, personal intercourse without regard to race. In practice the denial of social equality is not confined to personal relations, but includes civil procedure. The socially inferior Negro is exploited on the farm because white lawyers will not take his case against white planters. As soon as the bar of social inferiority is broken down the Negro threatens the white man with competition. Every demand for common justice for the Negro, that he be treated as a human being, if not as a United States citizen, can be and is met with the retort that the demand is for social equality. Instantly every chord of jealousy and hatred vibrates among certain classes of whites-and in the resulting atmosphere of unreasoning fury even the most moderate proposals for the betterment of race relations takes on the aspect of impossibilism. By the almost universal admission of white men and white newspapers, denial of social equality does not mean what the words imply. It means that Negroes cannot obtain justice in many Southern courts; it means that they cannot obtain decent education, accommodation in public places and on public carriers; it means that every means is used to force home their helplessness by insult, which, if it is resisted, will be followed by the administration of the torch or the hempen rope or the bullet.

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Hellraisers Journal: Prison Poem: “To My Little Son” by Ralph Chaplin & Etching of Ft. Leavenworth by Roderick Seidenberg

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Quote Frank Little re Guts, Wobbly by RC p208, Chg July 1917————————

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday December 3, 1921
Prison Poem by Ralph Chaplin: “To My Little Son”
& Etching by Roderick Seidenberg: “Ft. Leavenworth”

From The Liberator of December 1921:

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Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Prison Poem: “To My Little Son” by Ralph Chaplin & Etching of Ft. Leavenworth by Roderick Seidenberg”