Blog General

On August 24, 1939, three men stood above a small metal trashcan with a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in hand. As a newspaper photographer snaps a shot, Clell Pruett, a local sharecropper, tosses the book into the trashcan, which was then followed by a match. Pruett, along with his boss, the […]

In the early hours of a hot August morning in 1917, the body of a young union organizer hanged off a railroad trestle near Butte, Montana. The body, beaten and bloody, was that of Frank Little, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Pinned to the body was a note that cautioned, […]

Cultural diversity is one of the modern Labor Movement’s greatest strengths. Labor celebrates the richness of mutliculturalism and recognizes that the united voice above all else is the fabric that holds this Movement together. But the Labor Movement has not always been a bastion of racial understanding. In 1903 in the beet fields of Oxnard, […]

British Historian, G.R. Elton, once wrote, “It is the essence of the poor that they do not appear in history.” While this quote was said in context of the peasantry of Tudor England, it is a statement that can also be made about the Labor Movement in U.S. history. It could be argued that labor […]