Pérez Collado (1915 - 2014)

Sun Oct 17, 1915

Concha Pérez Collado, born on this day in 1915, was an anarchist involved with the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and anti-fascist soldier during the Spanish Civil War.

When the Civil War broke out, Collado already had access to weapons and training because she was part of an anarchist group that were preparing for what they saw as an inevitable military uprising. She saw action in Barcelona and Aragon, attacking prisons, building barricades for her neighborhood, and working in a munitions factory, before eventually moving to a French refugee camp where she gave birth to her only son.

Pérez Collado returned to Spain under Francisco Franco's rule and ran a jewelry shop with her partner Maurici Palau which doubled as a secret meeting place for anarchists. From 1982 to 1984, Collado participated in a series of interviews with Nick Rider about anarchism in Spain during the 1930s.

• Date: 1915-10-17
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, libcom.org.
• Tags: #Birthdays, #Anarchism, #Fascism.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Empire Zinc Strike (1950)

Tue Oct 17, 1950

The Empire Zinc Strike, also known as the Salt of the Earth strike, was a 15-month-long miners' strike that began on this day in 1950 in Silver City, New Mexico, against the Empire Zinc Company in protest of its discriminatory pay and company housing practices. Later, workers also demanded indoor plumbing and hot water for Mexican-American homes as well.

Empire Zinc fought back by sending police to harass picketers, posting eviction notices on company houses, and cutting off credit to strikers at the company grocery store. Labor activist Clinton Jencks, who was the union's business agent, was arrested on strike and kept in solitary confinement for 16 months. After the company got a court injunction forbidding picketers to return to the picket line, the workers' wives and children took their place.

After 15 months of protest, the company came to an agreement with the striking workers on January 21st, 1952, giving the strikers nearly everything they asked for. The strike drew national attention, and, after it was settled in 1952, a movie entitled "Salt of the Earth" (1954) was released that offered a fictionalized version of events.

• Date: 1950-10-17
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.pri.org.
• Tags: #Labor, #Imperialism, #Protests.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Million Man March (1995)

Mon Oct 16, 1995

Image: This photograph taken from the US Capitol Building shows thousands of people gathered on the Mall during the "Million Man March" in Washington D.C., on October 16th, 1995.

On this day in 1995, a collaborative rally of various civil rights and black liberation groups known as the "Million Man March" took place in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of thousands strong, the march included groups from across the political spectrum, from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to the National of Islam (NOI), and its purpose was to "convey to the world a vastly different picture of the Black male".

The rally's events were broken down into several sessions on specific topics, including "Sankofa: Lessons from the Past Linkages to the Future" and "Atonement and Reconciliation". Many prominent civil rights activists spoke at the event, including Betty Shabazz (widow of Malcolm X), Dr. Cornel West, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Rev. Benjamin Chavis, Jr., and Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Two years after the march, the Million Woman March was held in response to fears that the Million Man March had focused on black men to the exclusion of black women. Farrakhan held the 20th Anniversary of the "Million Man March: Justice or Else" on October 10th, 2015, in Washington, D.C.

• Date: 1995-10-16
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.blackpast.org.
• Tags: #Civil Rights.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Karl Kautsky (1854 - 1938)

Mon Oct 16, 1854

Karl Johann Kautsky was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theoretician born on this day in 1854. Kautsky was one of the most authoritative proponents of Orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, including during the Second International.

Kautsky founded the important socialist journal "Neue Zeit". Following the war, Kautsky was an outspoken critic of the Bolshevik Revolution, engaging in polemics with Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin on the nature of the Soviet state. Towards the end of his life, he became close friends with Rosa Luxemburg.

Of the USSR, he famously wrote "Foreign tourists in Russia stand in silent amazement before the gigantic enterprises created there, as they stand before the pyramids, for example. Only seldom does the thought occur to them what enslavement, what lowering of human self-esteem was connected with the construction of those gigantic establishments."

For his part, Lenin excoriated Kautsky's interpretations of Marxist thought stating "Kautsky has beaten the world record in the liberal distortion of Marx." (see Lenin's essay "How Kautsky Turned Marx Into A Common Liberal").

Kautsky is notable for, in addition to his anti-Bolshevik polemics, his editing and publication of Marx's Capital, Volume IV (usually published as "Theories of Surplus Value").

• Date: 1854-10-16
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.marxists.org.
• Tags: #Marxism, #Birthdays.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Black Panther Party Founded (1966)

Sat Oct 15, 1966

Image: 1969 photograph of Black Panther Party members outside a courthouse in New York City

On this day in 1966, in the wake of spontaneous riots against police brutality, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

In an interview recorded for the 1990 documentary "Eyes on the Prize II", Seale described the founding of the BPP in his own words:

"Black Panther Party, 1966, when Huey and I founded that organization, that particular year, numerous acts of police brutality had sparked a lot of spontaneous riots, something that Huey and I were against, the spontaneous riots.

Even a year earlier, in 1965, in Watts, you know, sixty-five people were killed, 200 wounded, 5,000 arrested. And Huey and I began to try to figure out how could we organize 5,000 youthful Black folks into some kind of political-electorial power movement.

Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture] was on the scene with Black Power. We were questioning, Huey and I, about the need for a functional definition of power and we came up with this, that 'power is the ability to define phenomena then in turn make it act in a desired manner.'

With the phenomena of racism structured in the city council at that time, Huey and I working with the North Oakland Neighborhood Service Center, the advisory board, we got 5,000 signatures for them to go to the city council, to get the city council to try to set up a police review board to deal with complaints of police brutality. Well, the city council ignored them.

So, that phenomena was that the city council was just a racist structure which could care less about the forty-eight percent Black and Chicano people who lived in the city of Oakland. So, there we are trying to figure out what to do. We finally concluded through those months that we had to start a new organization.

And we sit down and began to write out this Ten-Point Platform and Program in the North Oakland Neighborhood Service Center in North Oakland, California, in the community where Huey and I lived. And we wrote out this program.

'We want power to determine our own destiny in our own Black community', alluding to the needs to be organized-political electoral power. Full employment, decent housing, decent education that taught us about our true selves, not to have to fight in Vietnam, immediate end to police brutality and murder of back people was point number seven.

The right to have juries of our peers in the courts, what have you. We summed it up. We wanted land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace. And, in the tail end, we stuck in two famous paragraphs: 'When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to separate themself from the political bondage' - that was the emphasis, the political bondage - 'which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the Earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitled them.'

I mean, this was the kind of summarization we gave to our meaning. And we summarized that Ten-Point Platform Program, flipped a coin to see who would be chairman. I won chairman and we created the Black Panther Party."

• Date: 1966-10-15
• Learn More: repository.wustl.edu, www.youtube.com, www.britannica.com, www.jacobinmag.com.
• Tags: #Riots.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Thomas Sankara Assassinated (1987)

Thu Oct 15, 1987

Thomas Sankara was a Burkinabé revolutionary who expanded social welfare and nationalized natural resources in Burkina Faso. On this day in 1987, Sankara was assassinated in a coup led by Blaise Compaoré, who succeeded Sankara in power.

Thomas Sankara was a Burkinabé revolutionary and President of Burkina Faso, assassinated on this day in 1987. A Marxist-Leninist and Pan-Africanist, he was viewed by supporters as a charismatic and iconic figure of revolution and is sometimes referred to as "Africa's Che Guevara".

Sankara came into power when allies instigated a coup on his behalf in 1983. He immediately launched programs for social, ecological and economic change and renamed the country from the French colonial name Upper Volta to Burkina Faso ("Land of Incorruptible People"), with its people being called Burkinabé ("upright people").

Sankara's administration refused foreign aid to remain politically independent, with him stating "Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail". He also began nationalizing land and mineral wealth and promoted literacy, women's rights, and public health.

On this day in 1987, Sankara was assassinated by troops led by Blaise Compaoré, who assumed leadership of the state shortly after having Sankara killed. A week before his murder, Sankara had declared: "While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas".

• Date: 1987-10-15
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.thomassankara.net, jacobin.com, www.marxists.org.
• Tags: #Marxism, #Assassinations.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Max Hoelz (1889 - 1933)

Mon Oct 14, 1889

Max Hoelz, born on this day in 1889, was a German Communist most known for his role as a "Communist Bandit" in the 1920s, leading raids against police, releasing prisoners, and destroying property deeds.

Hoelz was politically radicalized by the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and by contact with Georg Schumann, a member of the socialist Spartakusbund (Schumann was later to be executed by the Nazis in 1945).

In 1920, after the right-wing Kapp Putsch, Hoelz organized workers from Falkenstein and Oelsnitz in a Red Guard, leading armed bands against the police, the army, and the far-right paramilitary Freikorps. In this role, he became a kind of "Robin Hood", raising money from employers under threat of reprisals, liberating prisoners, destroying property deeds and police archives, and burning villas of the rich.

Later in life, after the Nazis began to come into power, he moved to Soviet Russia. There, however, he became a dissident, criticizing bad working conditions in the country. On September 15th, 1933, he died in a "boating accident", which is speculated by anarchist historian Nick Heath to actually have been an NKVD assassination.

• Date: 1889-10-14
• Learn More: libcom.org, en.wikipedia.org.
• Tags: #Communism, #Birthdays, #Fascism.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Marcus Thrane (1817 - 1890)

Tue Oct 14, 1817

Image: Portrait of Marcus Thrane for business cards. Chicago circa 1875 [snl.no]

Marcus Thrane, born on this day in 1817, was a socialist labor activist who founded the first organized workers' movement in Norway. After a union he founded petitioned the King for universal suffrage and legal equality, Thrane was imprisoned.

Born into a bourgeois family, Thrane was orphaned at the early age of 15 and spent the rest of his youth studying abroad in Europe. He returned to Norway, working as an educator.

In 1848, Thrane began working as the editor of the local newspaper Drammens Adresse. Inspired by the February Revolution in France, Thrane expressed radical political opinions and was dismissed from the position after less than a year.

Around this time, Thrane founded the Drammens arbeiderforening (Drammen Labour Union) and began publishing the union's paper. Between 1849-50, the trade union movement (also called the Thranite Movement) grew very quickly, to approximately 30,000 members.

Members of the Thranite Movement were both urban and rural - both small farmers in the countryside and urban craftsmen participated.

This trade union movement is often associated with a petition presented to King Oscar I on May 19th, 1850. The petition, backed by nearly 13,000 signatures, demanded universal suffrage, abolition of protective tariffs, reform of the public school, and improvement of householders ' conditions.

Over the following years, this growing labor movement was repressed by the state - its leadership, including Thrane, were surveilled, arrested on false charges, and imprisoned. These tactics successfully broke the Thranite Movement, and Thrane himself left Norway for the U.S. in 1863.

In 1890, Thrane died in Wisconsin. His remains were returned to Norway in 1949, and he is buried in the Æreslunden at Vår Frelser's cemetery in Oslo.

• Date: 1817-10-14
• Learn More: snl.no, en.wikipedia.org, www.britannica.com.
• Tags: #Labor, #Birthdays.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Sid Mills Fish-in Arrest (1968)

Sun Oct 13, 1968

Image: Photo from the Facebook page "We the Indigenous"

On this day in 1968, while conducting a "Fish-in" protest on the Nisqually River in Washington state, activist Sid Mills was arrested. This was just one action from Mills' campaign of civil disobedience in demand of lawful fishing rights.

The Fish Wars were a series of protests in the 1960s and '70s in which Native American tribes around the Puget Sound pressured the U.S. government to recognize fishing rights granted by the Point No Point Treaty. The acts of protest often involved participants fishing "illegally" on rivers that previous treaties, then ignored, had granted them rights to.

On this day in 1968, while conducting a Fish-in protest at Frank's Landing on the Nisqually River, activist Sid Mills was arrested. He issued a statement:

"I am a Yakima and Cherokee Indian, and a man...I served in combat in Vietnam-until critically wounded...I hereby renounce further obligation in service or duty to the United States Army.

My first obligation now lies with the Indian People fighting for the lawful Treaty to fish in usual and accustomed water of the Nisqualiy, Columbia and other rivers of the Pacific Northwest, and in serving them in this fight in any way possible.

...My decision is influenced by the fact that we have already buried Indian fishermen returned dead from Vietnam, while Indian fishermen live here without protection and under steady attack..."

• Date: 1968-10-13
• Learn More: www.historyisaweapon.com, en.wikipedia.org.
• Tags: #Indigenous, #Protests.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Dorothy Bolden (1923 - 2005)

Sat Oct 13, 1923

Dorothy Lee Bolden, born on this day in 1923, was the founder of the National Domestic Worker's Union of America and civil rights activist who fought for women's rights and an end to segregation.

Bolden began working as a domestic worker at the age of nine and would eventually utilize her past experiences to form the Domestic Worker's Union in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Domestic Worker's Union had over 13,000 women members throughout the United States and won better pay and working conditions for them. Bolden was also responsible for registering thousands of black Americans to vote.

"I would say to [young people] that you have got to show yourself that you can be independent on your own. You don't have to follow. Why do we have to follow Tom, Dick and Harry to anything when we have the strength to be ourselves and be what we ought to be. What do you want to be? Ask yourself. Get in the mirror and look at yourself and say, 'So what do I want to be, what do I want to do? Where do I want to go and how do I get there?"

- Dorothy Bolden

• Date: 1923-10-13
• Learn More: www.blackpast.org, webapps.library.gsu.edu.
• Tags: #Labor, #Birthdays.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Ding Ling (1904 - 1986)

Wed Oct 12, 1904

Ding Ling, born on this day in 1904, was a prominent Chinese Marxist and feminist author. Despite being a member of the Communist Party, she was imprisoned and sentenced to manual labor during the Cultural Revolution.

In her early career, Ding Ling wrote highly successful short stories centering on young, unconventional Chinese women. Around 1930, she became a major literary figure of the leftist literature.

In 1931, her husband, communist poet Hu Yepin, was executed in Shanghai by the right-wing Kuomintang government for his association with the Communists. Shortly thereafter, Ding joined the Chinese Communist Party and her work reflected communist values.

According to authors Glenn Kucha and Jennifer Llewellyn, in 1957 Ding was denounced as a "rightist", purged from the party, imprisoned, and her fiction and essays were banned.

Ding and her husband were then sent to the countryside and compelled to do manual labor for more than a decade. She was rehabilitated sometime in the years following Mao Zedong's death in 1976.

"Happiness is to take up the struggle in the midst of the raging storm and not to pluck the lute in the moonlight or recite poetry among the blossoms."

- Ding Ling

• Date: 1904-10-12
• Learn More: alphahistory.com, en.wikipedia.org.
• Tags: #Communism, #Labor, #Marxism, #Birthdays.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Battle of Virden (1898)

Wed Oct 12, 1898

Image: Miners gathered on the train tracks in Virden, Illinois, the day before the Battle of Virden. October 11th, 1898. From the Mother Jones Museum.

On this day in 1898, the Battle of Virden began when armed members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) surrounded a train full of strikebreakers and exchanged fire with company guards. 13 people were killed, dozens more wounded.

After a local chapter of the UMW began striking at a mine in Virden, Illinois, the Chicago-Virden Coal Company hired black strikebreakers from Birmingham, Alabama and shipped them to Virden by train.

The company hired armed detectives or security guards to accompany the strikebreakers, and an armed conflict broke out when armed miners surrounded the train as it arrived in town. A total of four detectives and seven striking mine workers were killed, with five guards, thirty miners, and an unrecorded number of strikebreakers wounded.

After this incident, Illinois Governor John Tanner ordered the National Guard to prevent any more strikebreakers from coming into the state by force. The next month, the Chicago-Virden Coal Company relented and allowed the unionization of its workers.

"When the last call comes for me to take my final rest, will the miners see that I get a resting place in the same clay that shelters the miners who gave up their lives on the hills of Virden, Illinois...They are responsible for Illinois being the best organized labor state in America."

- Mother Jones

• Date: 1898-10-12
• Learn More: sangamoncountyhistory.org, www.motherjonesmuseummtolive.org, en.wikipedia.org, www.zinnedproject.org.
• Tags: #Labor.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org