Today is INTERNATIONAL ANARCHY DAY! Remember, remember the 11th of November. (Anniversary of the execution of the Haymarket Martyrs) 1887 -- Haymarket Martyrs – August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer & George Engel, all anarchists – executed, Chicago. A fifth, 23-year-old Louis Lingg, killed himself in his cell last night, cheating the state executioners. Prosecutors never found evidence they threw the bomb & so the police chief fabricated evidence for the trial of the Haymarket Massacre defendants. 250,000 people line Chicagos streets during Parsons funeral procession. The executions elicits an international outcry. Four labor activists, accused of murdering seven Chicago police officers at the Haymarket Riot the year before, are executed by hanging in Illinois. On May 4, 1886, a labor rally was held in Chicagos Haymarket Square to protest shooting of several strikers by the Chicago police the day before. Midway into the demonstration, made up of mostly German-born workers, a squad of nearly 200 hundred policemen arrived to break up the rally. As they began to forcibly disperse the crowd, a bomb was thrown into the advancing police by a person never positively identified. Policeman Mathias J. Degan died almost instantly, seven other officers died later, & over 60 others wounded. A grand jury indicted 31 labor radicals in connection with the bombing, & eight men were finally convicted. Judge Joseph E. Gary imposed the death sentence on seven of the men & the eighth was sentenced to 15 years. Samuel Fielden, Adolph Fischer, August Spies, & Albert Parson, executed by hanging, were the first labor activists to be executed in America. Of the other three sentenced to death, one commits suicide & the sentences of the other two are commuted from death to life-imprisonment as a result of public doubts about their actual responsibility in the massacre. In 1893, Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld pardons the three activists still imprisoned. There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are strangling to-day — Albert Spies
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 20:14:46 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015