By Pat Crowley in RIFuture.org
In 1934, during the
height of the Depression and one of the largest national strikes in history, 4 unarmed
Rhode Island workers were killed by State Police and Militia Men called out by
Governor Theodore Francis Green to protect the Saylesville Bleachery in
Lincoln, Rhode Island. It wasn’t a “strike,” he declared, but a “communist
insurrection.”
Whatever. Four workers were cut down in the
street. You can still see the bullet holes in the gravestones from the high
powered guns used against the strikers and each labor day some of us gather to
remind the powers that be that we are not all dead and buried.
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| AFL-CIO's Maureen Martin |
This year Maureen
Martin, Secretary-Treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO will deliver the
address at the memorial to the martyrs created by the Rhode Island Labor
History Society to memorialize what is known as The Battle of the
Gravestones.
The monument is
located in Moshassuck Cemetery, 978 Lonsdale Avenue in Central Falls.
If you like, you can
see actual newsreel video of the street battle here.
