Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #ludlowmassacre
Most recents (2)
1/ As we celebrate #LaborDay an often overlooked facet is the history of the Labor movement and how workers seeking better pay and conditions often were met with fatal force, extradition or arrest. 
2/ This includes the #GreatRailroadStrike of 1877 in which the National Guard and federal troops were used to suppress the strike and fired into crowds with an estimated 100 deaths nationwide. #LaborDay
3/ The 1886 #BayViewMassacre in Milwaukee in which the state militia opened fire against peaceful demonstrators calling for an 8-hr workday killing 15. #LaborDay
On this day in 1914, the Colorado National Guard torched a tent encampment of 1,200 coal miners & their families, then opened fire on them as they ran for their lives. Twenty-six men, women & children were killed in the incident, known as the #LudlowMassacre.
When the strike started, the mining companies evicted the miners from the shacks they had been forced to live in, as a result, the strikers created a tent encampment. For more than a year, the strikers fought off strike breakers & violent attacks.
The owner of one of the mines was the celebrated, capitalist Rockefeller family, who tried to destroy the strike by hiring a militia, which opened fire w/ a machine gun on the strikers. After that didn’t crush them, the Rockefellers paid for the deployment of Colorado’s NTL Guard
