Striking Steel Workers Seek to Enjoin Police from Interfering with Meetings
Striking steel workers in the Pittsburgh area, it was reported today, plan to seek an injunction against the police to stop them from interfering with strike and union-related meetings.
A strike-related meeting had been banned by Pittsburgh authorities three days earlier. The strike involved a massive nationwide union organizing effort directed toward over 500,000 steelworkers. In the end, however, the strike was unsuccessful.
The steel strike was one of many strikes across the country in the conflict-ridden year of 1919, which also included a coal miners strike, the famous Boston police strike, race riots in Washington, DC (July 19, 1919), Chicago (July 27, 1919), Omaha, Nebraska (September 28, 1919), and other cities, and the first of two infamous “Palmer Raids,” in which the Justice Department rounded up thousands of alleged radicals (November 7, 1919).
The president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor also wrote a letter to the governor of Pennsylvania charging the State Constabulary with breaking up union meetings and clubbing and jailing people.
Read: Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (2011)
Read the classic work on labor injunctions: Felix Frankfurter and Nathan Greene, The Labor Injunction (1930)
Learn more about the Great Steel Strike of 1919 at History.com