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Writer's pictureEmmanuel Mehr

May 30, 1937 (87 years ago today): Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago


A black-and-white photograph showing a line of uniformed police officers attacking a line of picketing demonstrators. This typewritten caption is included below the photograph: “A SOLID LINE OF COPS, 400 STRONG, BLOCK THE STRIKER’S PATH.”
"Memorial Day Steelworker Strike," 1937

May 30, 1937: More than 1,500 people attended a Republic Steel worker rally in Chicago to condemn both labor exploitation and police brutality against labor demonstrators. They then marched toward their workplace to picket. Police officers blocked the way and after a confrontation opened fire on the unarmed demonstrators, killing ten people. Steelworker Gus Yuratovac was near the front of the group of demonstrators. He later recalled that “The front of the line got about two or three blocks from the gate, when police stopped us and told us to disperse out of there. Two guys carrying American flags were clubbed down. You could hear the gunfire all around . . . People started running to get out of danger, but many were clubbed as they ran. We had people trying to pick up the wounded and dead  . . . the coppers were even clubbing these people down. The cops acted like they were in a frenzy, belting people laying on the ground. Paddy wagons pulled up and the cops threw the injured and dead in like cattle. God forbid that we should ever have to go through it again.”

 

Citations: Michael Dennis, Blood On Steel: Chicago Steelworkers and the Strike of 1937 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 37, 39, 59, 62, Kindle edition; United Steelworkers of America, “Remember Memorial Day May 30, 1937,” pamphlet, c. 1979, 8-9, https://www.sechicagohistory.org/archive/browse/remember-memorial-day-commemoration-booklet/; Southeast Chicago Historical Society, “Memorial Day Steelworker Strike,” photograph (Chicago, IL, May 30, 1937), Creative Commons, https://www.sechicagohistory.org/archive/browse/memorial-day-steelworker-strike/.

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