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
The massacre started when the National Guard troops fired their machine guns on the tents & the miners fired back. The National Guard lured the strikers’ leader away saying they wanted to negotiate a truce, but then murdered him. At dusk, the massacre began.
When the strike was finally crushed, the union had not won recognition, sixty-six men, women, and children had been killed (in over a year of striking) & not one militiaman or mine guard had been indicted for a crime.
Read more: zinnedproject.org/materials/ludl…
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