[text top to bottom]: Join us on Sunday May 1st, 3-7p.m. at the Kingsbridge Armory
29 W Kingsbridge Road, Bronx NY 10468
We will be speaking out in front of the Kingsbridge Armory against the injustices facing the working-class here in Kingsbridge and around the world.
Let’s move the people’s struggle away from downtown and into our hoods where we live, where we work, where we go to school, where we buy groceries. This way we can begin to really develop the bases of grassroots worker-led leadership that will help lead into a truly sustainable people’s movement towards Popular COntrol of our communities and Fundamental Social Change!
Join us on Tuesday April 26, 6:30-8:30p.m. 2800 University Avenue & 197th St, Bronx NY 10468
What is International Workers’ Day May Day? What does it meant to working people in the Bronx? New York CIty? the United States?
The political education session will be held in the lobby of 2800 University Avenue, where we have been organizing tenants towards Popular Control and Fundamental Social Change for the last two years. These bi-monthly sessions will aim to continue educating our neighbors in order to win the Kingsbridge struggle against racism, sexism, and capitalism.
The purpose of Political Education is to educate our members and the community about our history and to raise political consciousness through historical and critical analysis. We believe that consciousness grows with the process of struggle. Therefore, by studying our struggles we empower ourselves to organize and liberate our communities from racism/white supremacy, sexism, and capitalism.
We also believe that practice without theory is blind, and that theory without practice is aimless. Thus, our political education sessions serve as a compass for our political actions as we fight to achieve fundamental social change and obtain a humane society.
Join us on Tuesday April 26, 6:30-8:30p.m. 2800 University Avenue & 197th St, Bronx NY 10468
What is International Workers’ Day May Day? What does it meant to working people in the Bronx? New York CIty? the United States?
The political education session will be held in the lobby of 2800 University Avenue, where we have been organizing tenants towards Popular Control and Fundamental Social Change for the last two years. These bi-monthly sessions will aim to continue educating our neighbors in order to win the Kingsbridge struggle against racism, sexism, and capitalism.
The purpose of Political Education is to educate our members and the community about our history and to raise political consciousness through historical and critical analysis. We believe that consciousness grows with the process of struggle. Therefore, by studying our struggles we empower ourselves to organize and liberate our communities from racism/white supremacy, sexism, and capitalism.
We also believe that practice without theory is blind, and that theory without practice is aimless. Thus, our political education sessions serve as a compass for our political actions as we fight to achieve fundamental social change and obtain a humane society.
[text top to bottom]: Join us on Sunday May 1st, 3-7p.m. at the Kingsbridge Armory
29 W Kingsbridge Road, Bronx NY 10468
We will be speaking out in front of the Kingsbridge Armory against the injustices facing the working-class here in Kingsbridge and around the world.
Let’s move the people’s struggle away from downtown and into our hoods where we live, where we work, where we go to school, where we buy groceries. This way we can begin to really develop the bases of grassroots worker-led leadership that will help lead into a truly sustainable people’s movement towards Popular COntrol of our communities and Fundamental Social Change!
[text top to bottom]: Join us on Sunday May 1st, 3-7p.m. at the Kingsbridge Armory
29 W Kingsbridge Road, Bronx NY 10468
We will be speaking out in front of the Kingsbridge Armory against the injustices facing the working-class here in Kingsbridge and around the world.
Let’s move the people’s struggle away from downtown and into our hoods where we live, where we work, where we go to school, where we buy groceries. This way we can begin to really develop the bases of grassroots worker-led leadership that will help lead into a truly sustainable people’s movement towards Popular COntrol of our communities and Fundamental Social Change!
In addition to being a celebration of summer, May 1st or May Day, is also known as Workers’ Day or International Workers’ Day. It’s a day to commemorate the historic struggles and gains of workers and labor unions, and to further advocate for the rights of workers today. In the United States, workers are officially recognized on the public holiday of Labor Day, in September.
Above, Minneapolis workers march the streets of Downtown Minneapolis in 1934and1937.
May Day demonstration in Victoria Road, Glasgow c1930s. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) are marching alongside the nearest tram.
May Day 1946, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Mr Katalinga (Rhodesia trade unions) and Mr Kemp (Glasgow City Labour Party) walk in front of the Glasgow District Trades Council banner.
May Day 1960, singer Paul Robeson at Queens Park, where he told the crowd “You will need all the strength you have got to see that you who create the wealth of the country have a chance to enjoy it!”
May Day 1962.
May Day march 1984 in Glasgow in support of the Miners’ Strike March.
International Workers’ Day: ‘The Great Upheaval’ to the ‘Triumph of Labour’
Thefirst of May has long been a day of celebration – whether of the arrival of spring or of religious festivities – and, since 1886 at least, been known as International Workers’ Day.
Here are some images to give an abridged history of how this day became a rallying cry for political solidarity among the world’s workers:
The top illustration (from Melbourne) summed up the demands of workers’ strikes during some historians have called the great upheaval, a period towards the end of the 19th century when radical groups including socialists, union organizers, and anarchists became increasingly vocal and demonstrative with their calls for better conditions and terms for workers. Chicago, among other cities, was a maelstrom of these forces clashing with police, politicians, and bosses.
On May 1, 1886, after months of deadly confrontations and years of simmering conflict, a group of unionized furniture workers urged other union members across the city in a walk-out:what they got was a march of roughly 100,00 workers and others in solidarity (estimates of the number differ widely, some saying close to half a million at the day’s peak).Across the country at the same time, workers’ strikes and marches were occurring too, particularly around strong radical populations as in New York, thus marking the first multi-city mass march in American history.
The Haymarket Sq. Rally [image 2]: a few days later, after several days of growing unrest and demonstrations at which multiple protestors were killed in police encounters, a rally for a largely German-ethnic workers’ group gathered to hear several militant anarchists, including newspaper man and upholsterer August Spies, who was speaking when everything went incendiary.
A bomb went off just in front of several mounted policemen who had arrived to jeer and instruct the disassembly of the rally – the frontmost officer was killed. From there, all hell broke loose: policemen fired on and swung batons at the crowd – and whether they fired twice or just the first time in the chaos was a matter for the trial afterwards – while reports differed on whether anyone in the crowd fired in return or, as Spies insisted, they were unarmed[x]. In the end, officially two workers were killed, though the number of casualties who were able to escape the Square but who may have died from their wounds without seeking official medical attention is impossible to know. A further five policemen died from their injuries, though one police officer anonymously told The Chicago Tribute that much damage was done by police firing on each other in the dark, chaos, and sudden smoke.
The Haymarket Martyrs [image 4: ‘The Anarchists of Chicago’, by Walter Crane] Following the rally, the mayor arrested seven known militant radicals, including Spies, Adolph Fincher/Fischer, George Engel, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, Albert Parsons, Louis Lingg, and Michael Schwab (many of whom worked for Arbeiter-Zeitung, the dual English and German radical newspaper), and sent them to trial.
in the end, the jury – who all testified before the trial began with some degree of prejudice against the defendants (who were tried in a group rather than individually) – convicted the 7 men of the bombing and resultant policeman’s death. Two had sentences commuted (and seeing his appeals fail, Lingg had killed himself rather than be executed), but on 11 November 1887, Spies, Parsons, Engel, and Fischer were hanged. Their deaths became seen by radicals and aggrieved workers worldwide as martyrdoms to the cause; in 1893, the then-Governor declared that the 1887 trial had been a shameful miscarriage of justice, and released and pardoned the men still in jail.
Since the 1886 May Day marches, strikes, and subsequent struggles, workers have continued to use the holiday to highlight the ongoing plight of working people across the globe. Famously, the Soviet revolution in Russia made May Day an official worker’s holiday, which led, over the course of the USSR’s history (and later also, Maoist Chinese), to a deep irony of the propagandistic and increasingly sunny imagery of Soviet or Communist posters for May Day in contrast to the actual conditions of the proletariat in those countries. [Image 7, for example, shows some Soviet stamps from 1989 celebrating May Day; beside that, image 8 reads, "Ot mraka k svetu, ot bitvy k knige, ot goria k schast’iu[From darkness into light; from Battle to Books; from Misery to happiness]”, a poster by Nikolai Kogut (Moscow, 1921). Image 6, on the other hand, shows a poster using the familiar imagery of the female worker, barefoot and in nondescript dress, waving a red flag – here to celebrate the German institution of International Women’s Day, 8 March 1914.]
Lastly, image 9 is the high-def panorama illustration of Walter Crane’s 1891 “The Triumph of Labour” [via Morna O’Neill]. As O’Neill describes,
“Crane created his most famous commemoration of the socialist May Day celebration, The Triumph of Labour, in 1891 (Fig. 5). It would become the definitive image of English socialism. Borrowing slogans and emblems (such as the Phrygian bonnet) from the French RevolutionandEnglish trade unionism, the cartoon celebrates the unity of industrial, agricultural, and artistic labour rendered as the happy progression of liberated workers through a setting of natural bounty. The cartoon brims with decorative emblems (from the cornucopia of Lady Bountiful to the banner carried aloft by the labourers) executed in Crane’s rich linear style. It does not have recourse to the modern idiom of the newspaper or the usual political-cartoon arsenal of satire, parody, and caricature. Rather, it is a revolutionary expression of the ideal future through what Crane termed “succinct, emphatic, or heraldic expression in rich, beautiful, and symbolic form” to embody “social ideals” (Crane, “Art and Character” 114). These decorative forms embody political ideals: The Triumph of Labour is an emblematic rendering of the future promised by the hope of socialism and the central place of art in articulating and realizing that future. Rich with allusions, dense in imagery,The Triumph of Labour is a compendium of Crane’s artistic practice. At the far left, signalling his faith in the intertwined nature of art and labour, he portrays himself holding aloft a palette and riding beside an architect in a wagon bearing the standard “Wage Workers of all Countries Unite.”According to G. K. Chesterton, writing in 1912, socialists recognize each other “on the fact that a man of their sort will have … Walter Crane’s ‘Triumph of Labour’ hanging in the hall” (142). For Crane, all art—whether painting, design, decorative object, or political cartoon—constituted a better, more beautiful world that implicitly and, at times, presciently condemns the current one. Crane’s art expressed the revolutionary power of creativity and beauty, and gave voice to his hope for a better world.” [x]
May 1st, 1886: Rallies throughout the United States demanding an eight-hour workday begin. May 1st is celebrated as International Workers’ Day in many countries.
These images of Tokyo come from our Harrison Forman Collection. Forman took these photos of a May Day Demonstration celebrating workers and laborers in Japan in 1972. This day can also be known as International Workers Day, Workers Day, or Labor Day. The day is celebrated with parades, barbecues, and demonstrations like this one featured above. Many countries celebrate their Labor Days on May 1st, with notable exceptions United States and Canada celebrating on September 1st.
[Image description: A large gathering of Japanese workers in Tokyo with red flags and political signs in front of pine trees.]
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![[text top to bottom]: [caption under image]: Solidarity June 30, 1917 The Hand That Will Rule the Wo](https://64.media.tumblr.com/1691ff42d5d73c36a8b2963040e9992d/tumblr_o5lhk1LwMr1su554uo1_640.jpg "[text top to bottom]: [caption under image]: Solidarity June 30, 1917 The Hand That Will Rule the Wo")
