User:50.189.40.55

Women's Day Massacre of 1937

The Women’s Day Massacre was occurred On June 19, 1937 (seventy-seven years ago) in Youngstown, Ohio after police used tear gas on picketing women and their kids. Steel strikes were fairly common and were often in response to bad working conditions or low pay. The SWOC had held a “Women’s Day” on the picket line. Women on the picket line were definitely a problem at least the Youngstown police though so. Charley Richmond, who was a rough Youngstown police captain and was not terribly pleased about having women on the picket line and definitely made it known to all. The police were pretty vocal (spitting and shouting at the women), about not wanting them on the picket lines and the police even initially used tear gas on the women.] Everyone disappeared when the grenades were thrown. Clingan Jackson, at the time a union organizer recalled, When I got there I thought the Great War had started over again. Gas was flying all over the place and shots flying and flares going up and it was the first time I had ever seen anything like it in my life.” “Jackson was a 30 year old general assignment and labor reporter covering the strike for The Vindicator. He and Vindicator photographer Edward Salt were on Poland Avenue on June 19, 1937 when “all hell broke loose,” Jackson said. “Immediately several union supporters fell wounded, but surprisingly, the crowd did not flee the scene. It regrouped to re-engage the police.” The crowds did regroup and decided to take out their anger on a police officer. The crowd beat a police officer after he became separated from the rest. In turn, the police panicked and opened fire from the mill’s main gate. The crowd became absolutely furious after a faulty rumor circulated that the police had killed a pregnant steelworker’s wife. The governor of Ohio, Martin L. Davey, sent National Guard troops in to quell the fighting but it did little to end the violence. According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the New York Times, after viewing footage of the 1937 steelworker’s strike, “Those who saw [the newsreel were shocked and amazed by scenes showing uniformed policemen firing their revolvers point-blank into a dense crowd of men, women and children and then pursuing and clubbing the survivors unmercifully as they made frantic efforts to escape…”] The fighting continued throughout the night and as a result, forty strikers died and approximately ten people were injured in the fighting. Everyone was shot in either their back or side. Labor unions were legalized in 1935 by the Wagner-Connery Act but often weren’t formally recognized, not as we know them anyway, until 1941. In 1937, Little Steele had refused to recognize the law and effectively, handled everything on its own – legal or not.