^
Deaths
which occurred on a 21 June:
2005
George Hawi (or Georges Haoui) [1938–], former head (1979-1993)
of the Lebanese Communist Party, at 09:30 (06:30 UT), killed by a remote-control
bomb under the front passenger seat of his car, in Beirut. His driver survives
with light injuries. Syrian agents are suspected of the crime. Hawi had
turned against the Syrian occupiers after the assassination of Rafik
Hariri [01 Nov 1944 – 14 Feb 2005].
 ^
2005 Cardinal Jaime Lachica
Sin.
[< photo]
He was born on 31 August 1928, the 14th of the 16 children in an ethnic
Chinese family in the Philippines. He was ordained a priest on 03
April 1954 and consecrated as an auxiliary bishop for the Jaro diocese
on 18 March 1967. He succeeded as archbishop of Jaro on 08 October
1972, and was appointed archbishop of Manila on 21 January 1974. Pope
Paul VI [26 Sep 1897 – 06 Aug 1978] made him a cardinal on 24
May 1976. Sin retired as Manila's archbishop on 15 September 2003,
suffering from diabetes and associated kidney problems.
Cardinal
Sin was one of the few Catholic prelates who has been allowed to visit
Communist China. During the 1980s he established the Lorenzo Ruiz
Institute in Manila to train priests for service to the Church in
China, for when the government there would allow their entry. For
now, most of the priests trained at that Institute serve in ethnic-Chinese
parishes in the Philippines.
In
1986 Cardinal Sin became a leader of the "People Power" revolt against
the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos [11 Sep 1917 – 28 Sep 1989],
and in February 1986, he drew together 1 million people to form a
human barricade, blocking the progress of tanks that had been sent
into Manila to suppress a military mutiny. Corazon Aquino [25 Jan
1933~] became president in replacement of Marcos, who had ordered
the murder of her husband Nino Aquino [27 Nov 1932 – 21 Aug
1983]. In 2001, Cardinal Sin was instrumental in the fall of President
Joseph Estrada because of political corruption.
The death of Cardinal Sin leaves 181 cardinals. Of the 115 of them
below the age of 80 and thus entitled to vote in a conclave, the oldest
are Marco Cé [08 Jul 1925~], former Patriarch of Venice, and
Francisco Alvarez Martínez [14 Jul 1925~].
—
Cardinal Sin was not related to any cardinal sin
(pride; greed; lust; envy; gluttony; anger; sloth; according to the
Summa
Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas), though, like all humans
except Jesus and Mary, he was born affected by original
sin. Nor was he related to Sin, the ancient Mesopotamian god of
the moon. |
CARDINAL
SINS, NOT RELATED TO CARDINAL SIN
|
2003 Abdullah Qawasme, head of the military wing of Hamas
in Hebron, West Bank, shot at 21:15 at the entrance of a mosque in the center
of Hebron, by 15 Israeli policemen who had just jumped out of three unmarked
cars.
2003 Leon
Uris, born on 03 August 1924, US Jewish author of Exodus
(1958, a story of European Jewry from the turn of the century to the establishment
of the state of Israel in 1948), Topaz (1967, about Russian espionage
during the Cuban missile crisis), Trinity (story of three Irish
families from the mid-19th century to the Easter Rising of 1916), Battle
Cry (1953, based on his Marine experiences), The Angry Hills
(1955, spy novel based loosely on the diary of an uncle who had fought in
World War II in Greece as a member of the British Army's Palestine Brigade),
Armageddon: A Novel of Berlin" (1964, about its various crises
from the end of WW2 until the airlift); and O'Hara's Choice (October
2003). Uris' other novels include Trinity (about Ireland's 19th-century
struggle for independence) and its sequel Redemption (1995); QBVII,
a courtroom drama based on his legal troubles with the movie adaptation
of Exodus; The Haj (1984, about the birth of Israel as
viewed by a Palestinian); A God in Ruins (1999, about an Irish
Catholic US presidential candidate opposed to guns who turns out to be Jewish);
and Mila 18 (1961, about the Jewish uprising in Warsaw during World
War II). Uris' most personal novel, Mitla Pass (1988) closely follows
the lives of the author and his family. The book begins in Israel in 1956
during the time of the Suez Canal crisis and centers on the experiences
of Gideon Zadok, a writer covering the incident. The novel then traces Zadok's
ancestry back to the 1880s, allowing various relatives to tell their stories.
Uris loaded his novels with excessive exposition and information. He was
not as good a writer as Pynchon, Barthelme, or Nabokov; but he was a better
storyteller.
2003 Moshe Kupferman (or Kupperman) Israeli
abstract painter, born in Poland in 1926. — MORE
ON KUPFERMAN AT ART “4” JUNE
with links to images.
2002 Adnan Auda, 22, Palestinian,
shot in the chest by Yosef Cohen, one of a group of Jewish settlers rampaging
through Palestinian villages near Nablus, setting fire to homes and cars,
after the funeral of the five Itamar settlers
murdered the previous day by two Palestinian gunmen.
2002
Mahmoud Massir, and two innocent Palestinian workers, at the Erez
crossing in the Gaza Strip, by Israeli Border Police officers firing back
at Massir after he throws hand grenades and fires at them. A third Palestinian
worker is seriously injured.
2002 Abed a-Samed Samalah,
10, Palestinian, by Israeli shelling while he was at home in the northern
Gaza strip. A mother and three of her children were wounded.
2002
Ahmed Ghazawi, 6, his brother Jamil Ghazawi, 12, girl Sajedah Famahwi, 6,
and Helal Shetta, 50, deputy director of the department of education
of Jenin, West Bank, by Israeli tank shells fired in a Jenin market where
a group of Palestinian had come to buy food, thinking that the round-the-clock
curfew imposed by the Israeli invaders which is starving them, had been
temporarily lifted.
2002 “Clifford
Possum” Tjapaltjarri, Australian aborigine painter born
in 1932. — MORE
ON POSSUM AT ART “4” JUNE with
links to images.
1992 Joan Fuster, escritor y ensayista
español. .
1990 25'000 in Iranian earthquake.
1989 Leo E. Edwards, in the Mississippi the gas chamber
for a 1980 robbery and murder.
1986 Al menos 200 personas
mueren sepultadas bajo un alud de tierra en una carretera de la
provincia ecuatoriana de Putumayo.
1985 Tage Erlander,
ex-primer ministro sueco.
1975 Émile Grau-Sala,
French painter born on 22 June 1911. — links
to two images.
1970 Ahmed Sukarno, estadista indonesio.
^
1969 Many Communists attacking US base and a
few US defenders.
Approximately 600 Communist soldiers storm a US base near Tay Ninh,
80 km northwest of Saigon and 20 km from the Cambodian border. The
North Vietnamese had been shelling the base for two days, followed
by six attacks on the city itself and the surrounding villages. About
1000 civilians fled their homes as Allied and Communist troops fought
in the city streets. The US troops eventually prevailed and it was
reported that 146 Communist soldiers were killed in the bitter street
fighting. Ten Americans were killed and 32 were wounded. Total Communist
losses around Tay Ninh during the two-day battle were put at 194 killed.
|
^
1964 Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney,
civil rights activists, shot by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob near Meridian,
Mississippi.
The three young
civil rights workers were working to register black voters in Mississippi,
thus inspiring the ire of the local Klan. The deaths of Schwerner
and Goodman, white Northerners and members of the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE), causes a national outrage.
When the desegregation movement encountered resistance in the early
1960s, CORE set up an interracial team to ride buses into the Deep
South to help protest. These so-called Freedom Riders were viciously
attacked in May 1961 when the first two buses arrived in Alabama.
One bus was firebombed, the other boarded by KKK members who beat
the activists inside. The Alabama police provided no protection. Still,
the Freedom Riders were not dissuaded, and they continued to come
into Alabama and Mississippi.
Michael Schwerner was a particularly dedicated activist, living in
Mississippi while he registered blacks to vote. Sam Bowers, the local
Klan's Imperial Wizard, decided that Schwerner was a bad influence
and had to be killed. When Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, a young
black man who was acting as a liaison to the black community, were
coming back from a trip to Philadelphia, Mississippi, deputy sheriff
Cecil Price, who was also a Klan member, pulled them over for speeding.
He then held them in custody while other KKK members prepared for
their murder.
Eventually released,
the three activists were later chased down in their car and cornered
in a secluded spot in the woods where they were shot and then buried
in graves that had been prepared in advance. When news of their disappearance
got out, the FBI converged in Mississippi to investigate. With the
help of an informant, federal agents learned about the Klan's involvement
and found the bodies. Since Mississippi refused to prosecute the assailants
in state court, the federal government charged 18 men with conspiracy
to violate the civil rights of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney. Bowers,
Price, and five other men were convicted; eight were acquitted; and
the all-white jury deadlocked on the other three defendants. Setting
a precedent, the verdict against Klan members helped to push Southern
society toward racial equality.
—
In Neshoba County in central Mississippi, three civil
rights field workers disappear after investigating the burning of
an Black church by the Ku Klux Klan. Michael Schwerner and Andrew
Goodman, both white New Yorkers, had traveled to heavily segregated
Mississippi in 1964 to help organize civil rights efforts on behalf
of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The third man, James Chaney,
was a local Black man who had joined CORE in 1963. The disappearance
of the three young men garnered national attention and led to a massive
FBI investigation that was code-named MIBURN, for "Mississippi Burning."
Michael Schwerner, who arrived in Mississippi as a CORE field worker
in January 1964, aroused the animosity of white supremacists after
he organized a successful black boycott of a variety store in the
city of Meridian and led voting registration efforts for Blacks. In
May, Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan of Mississippi, sent word that the 24-year-old Schwerner,
nicknamed "Goatee" and "Jew-Boy" by the KKK, was to be eliminated.
On the evening of 16 June two dozen armed Klansmen descended on Mt.
Zion Methodist Church, an Black church in Neshoba County that Schwerner
had arranged to use as a "Freedom School." Schwerner was not there
at the time, but the Klansmen beat several Blacks present and then
torched the church.
On 20 June
1964Schwerner returned from a civil rights training session in Ohio
with 21-year-old James Chaney and 20-year-old Andrew Goodman, a new
recruit to CORE. The next day, 21 June 1964, the three went to investigate
the burning of the church in Neshoba. While attempting to drive back
to Meridian, they were stopped by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil
Price just inside the city limits of Philadelphia, the county seat.
Price, a member of the KKK who had been looking out for Schwerner
or other civil rights workers, threw them in the Neshoba County jail,
allegedly under suspicion for church arson. After seven hours in jail,
during which the men were not allowed to make a phone call, Price
released them on bail. After escorting them out of town, the deputy
returned to Philadelphia to drop off an accompanying Philadelphia
police officer. As soon as he was alone, he raced down the highway
in pursuit of the three civil rights workers. He caught the men just
inside county limits and loaded them into his car. Two other cars
pulled up filled with Klansmen who had been alerted by Price of the
capture of the CORE workers, and the three cars drove down an unmarked
dirt road called Rock Cut Road. Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were
shot to death and their bodies buried in an earthen dam a few kilometers
from the Mt. Zion Church. The next day, the FBI began an investigation
into the disappearance of the civil rights workers. On 23 June the
case drew national headlines, and federal agents found the workers'
burned station wagon. Under pressure from Attorney General Robert
F. Kennedy, the FBI escalated the investigation, which eventually
involved more than 200 FBI agents and scores of federal troops who
combed the woods and swamps looking for the bodies.
The incident provided the final impetus needed for the 1964 Civil
Rights Act to pass Congress on 02 July, and eight days later FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover came to Mississippi to open a new Bureau office. Eventually,
Delmar Dennis, a Klansman and one of the participants in the murders,
was paid $30'000 and offered immunity from prosecution in exchange
for information. On 04 August the remains of the three young men were
found. The culprits were identified, but the state of Mississippi
made no arrests. Finally, on 04 December, nineteen men, including
Deputy Price, were indicted by the US Justice Department for violating
the civil rights of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney (charging the suspects
with civil rights violations was the only way to give the federal
government jurisdiction in the case). After nearly three years of
legal wrangling, in which the US Supreme Court ultimately defended
the indictments, the men went on trial in Jackson, Mississippi. The
trial was presided over by an ardent segregationist, US District Judge
William Cox, but under federal pressure from federal authorities and
fearing impeachment, he took the case seriously. On 27 October 1967
an all-white jury found seven of the men guilty, including Price and
KKK Imperial Wizard Bowers. Nine were acquitted and the jury deadlocked
on three others. The mixed verdict was hailed as a major civil rights
victory, as no one in Mississippi had ever before been convicted for
actions taken against a civil rights worker. In December, Judge Cox
sentenced the men to prison terms ranging from three to 10 years.
After sentencing, he said, "They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a
white man. I gave them what I thought they deserved." None of the
convicted men served more than six years behind bars.
On
06 January 2004, one of the 18 men who were tried on federal conspiracy
charges still alive, klansman Edgar Ray Killen, 79, was arrested for
the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. It was the first time
the state has sought criminal charges in the case that outraged a
nation. Killen was selected “because he was high profile and
we knew where he was.”
Michael Schwerner, born on 06 November 1939, "Goatee"
to the klan of Neshoba and Lauderdale counties, was the most despised
civil rights worker in Mississippi. Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers
ordered Schwerner's "elimination" in May 1964. The Klan
finally got its chance to carry out the elimination order on 21 June
1964. Because James Chaney and Andy Goodman were with Schwerner, and
would know too much if they were not killed, they also had to die.
Twenty-four-year-old Schwerner had
come to Mississippi in January of 1964 with his wife Rita after having
been hired as a CORE field worker. In his application for the CORE
position, Schwerner, a native of New York City, wrote "I have
an emotional need to offer my services in the South." Schwerner
added that he hoped to work for an integrated society for "the
rest of his life" (it was shorter than he had a right to expect,
but he did). On 15 January 1964, Michael and Rita left New York in
their VW Beetle for Mississippi. After talking with civil rights leader
Bob Moses in Jackson, Schwerner was sent to Meridian to organize the
community center and other programs in the largest city in eastern
Mississippi. Schwerner became the first white civil rights worker
to be permanently based outside of the capitol of Jackson.
Once in Meridian, Schwerner quickly earned the hatred of local KKK
by organizing a boycott of a variety store until the store, which
sold mostly to Blacks, hired its first Black. He also came under heavy
attack for his determined efforts to register Blacks to vote. After
a few months in Meridian, despite hate mail and threatening phone
calls and police harassment, Schwerner believed he made the right
decision in coming to Mississippi. Mississippi, he said, “is
the decisive battleground for America. Nowhere in the world is the
idea of white supremacy more firmly entrenched, or more cancerous,
than in Mississippi.”.
 Andrew
Goodman, born on 23 November 1943, died on what ought
to have been his first full day in Mississippi. Goodman had arrived
in the state early the previous morning after attending a three-day
training session in Ohio for volunteers for the Mississippi Summer
Project. Goodman arrived in Mississippi excited and anxious to get
to work.
Andy Goodman was intelligent,
unassuming, happy, and outgoing. He grew up as the second of three
sons in a liberal household on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Goodman
attended the progressive Walden School, widely known for its anti-authoritarian
approach to learning. While a high school sophomore at Walden, Goodman
had gone to Washington DC to participate in the "Youth March
for Integrated Schools." As a senior, he and a classmate visited
a depressed coal mining region in West Virginia to prepare a report
on poverty in the US.
After graduating
from Walden, Goodman enrolled at Queens College in part because of
its strong drama department. Soon, however, his longing for commitment
led him away from his interest in drama and back to politics. In April
1964, Goodman applied for and was accepted into the Mississippi Summer
Project. Although not seeing himself as a professional reformer, Goodman
knew that his life had been somewhat sheltered and thought that the
experience would be educational and useful.
 James
Earl Chaney was born on 30 May 1943 in Meridian, Mississippi
to Ben and Fannie Lee Chaney. In 1963, he joined the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE). In 1964, CORE led a massive voter registration and
desegregation campaign in Mississippi called Freedom Summer. As part
of the Freedom Summer activities, Chaney was riding with Schwerner
and Goodman when all three were attacked and killed by the Ku Klux
Klan.
Chaney was twenty-one when
he died on Rock Cut Road. Chaney had begun volunteer work at the new
CORE office in Meridian in October, 1963, after a girlfriend introduced
Chaney to Matt Suarez, the office's first director. Chaney soon became
Suarez's chief aide, guide, and companion. His work ranged from constructing
bookshelves at the community center to traveling to rural counties
to set up meetings. Chaney, being black, was able to go places white
CORE members were afraid to go. To Mississippi Whites, Chaney was
"as inconspicuous as an alley cat." When the Schwerners
arrived in January to assume direction of the Meridian office, they
found Chaney to be their most willing volunteer.
Chaney was a native of Meridian and the eldest son in a family of
five children. His mother, a domestic servant, was protective; his
father, a plasterer, left his mother when James was in his mid-teens.
He was slightly built, but athletic. He was described as shy in public,
but a cutup in his home.
Chaney
first encountered problems at the Catholic school for Negroes he attended
in 1959, when he was sixteen. Chaney was suspended for a week when
he refused to remove a yellow paper NAACP "button." The
next year he was expelled from school for fighting. Chaney tried to
join the army, but his asthma resulted in a 4-F disqualification.
Unemployed and restless, Chaney joined the Negro plasterer's union,
where he apprenticed with his father. His work as a plasterer ended
in 1963 after a fight with his father.
|
1949 Edward Alexander Wadsworth, British painter born on
29 October 1889. — MORE
ON WADSWORTH AT ART “4” JUNE
with links to images.
1948 D'Arcy
Thompson, mathematician.
1943 Federal
troops put down racial riot in Detroit 30 dead.
1940 Edouard
Vuillard, French painter, draftsman, and printmaker, born on 11
November 1868. — MORE
ON VUILLARD AT ART “4” JUNE
with links to images.
1938 Eduardo Castillo Gálvez,
49, víctima de la morfina. poeta colombiano. Nacido en 1889, Eduardo
Castillo fue co-autor de Duelo lírico (1918). Tradujo La parábola
del resucitado, de Oscar Wilde. Aparecieron sus poemas Desfile
blanco (1920), Réplica a Rivera y Guillermo Valencia (1921),
La coronación de Julio Flórez, Visión prerrafaelita. El árbol
que canta, su texto más conocido, aparece en 1928. Los poemas La
Tisana y Leticia -homenaje a Leticia Velásquez- en 1825. Autor
de poemas infantiles tales como La dulzaina y El grillo cautivo
(1935), fueron sus últimas obras el poema Entre el cielo y el mar
y el ensayo En torno a Delio Seravile (1936). Apareció poco después
de su muerte su libro de poemas Los siete carrizos.
1929
Ferdinand
Rudio, German mathematician born on 02 August 1856. He worked
on group theory, algebra and geometry. He is best remembered for his work
in the history of mathematics.
1920 Gaetano Previati,
Italian artist born on 31 August 1852.
^
1916, 37
Mexican and 17 US soldiers at the battle of Carrizal
The controversial US military expedition
against Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa brings the US and Mexico
closer to war when Mexican government troops attack US Brigadier General
John J. Pershing’s force at Carrizal, Mexico. The Americans suffer
seventeen casualties, and thirty-eight Mexicans are killed.
Against the protests of Venustiano
Carranza’s government, Pershing had been penetrating deep into Mexico
in pursuit of Villa. After routing the small Mexican force at Carrizal,
the US expedition continued on its southern course. In 1914, following
the resignation of Mexican leader Victoriano Huerta, Pancho Villa
and his former revolutionary ally Venustiano Carranza battled each
other in a struggle for succession.
By the end of 1915, Villa had been driven north into the mountains
and the US government had recognized General Venustiano Carranza as
the president of Mexico. In January of 1916, a group of US citizens
were killed by unknown bandits in Chihuahua, and, on 09 March 1916,
Villa, angered by President Woodrow Wilson’s support for Carranza,
led a band of several hundred guerillas across the border and raided
the town of Columbus, New Mexico, killing seventeen Americans. US
troops pursued the Mexicans, killing fifty on US soil and seventy
more in Mexico.
On 15 March 1916,
under orders from President Woodrow Wilson, General Pershing led 6600
soldiers over the border to capture Villa dead or alive. Over the
next eleven months, Pershing, like Carranza, failed to capture the
elusive revolutionary and Mexican resentment over the US intrusion
into their territory led to a diplomatic crisis.
On 21 June 1916, Mexican government troops attacked Pershing’s forces
at Carrizal, but the US troops refused to withdraw. On 28 January
1917, having failed in their mission to capture Villa, and under increasing
pressure from the Mexican government, the Americans were ordered home.
Villa continued his guerilla activities in northern Mexico until Adolfo
de la Huerta took power in Mexico and drafted a reformist constitution.
Villa entered into an amicable agreement with Huerta and agreed to
retire from politics. In 1920, the government pardoned Villa, but
three years later he was assassinated at Parral |
1913 Gaston
Tarry, French mathematician born on 27 September 1843. He is
best known for his work on Euler's 36 Officer Problem, proving that two
orthogonal Latin squares of order 6 did not exist. He also published an
algorithm for exploring mazes, which is called after him.
1908
Rimsky-Korsakov, compositor ruso.
1900 Francesco
Beda, Italian artist born on 29 November 1840.
1898
Manuel Tamayo y Baus, dramaturgo español.
^
1892 Lot Smith, Mormon soldier,
killed by Amerindians
Lot Smith, one of the leading soldiers in the Mormon's military confrontation
with the United States Army, is killed by Navahos in Utah. Smith was
born into a Mormon family in Oswego, New York. At the age of 16, he
joined a contingent of Latter-day Saints who fought for the United
States in the Mexican War in California. He then moved to Utah, where
he joined Brigham Young's Territorial Militia and saw action in several
campaigns against Native Americans who were hostile to the Mormon
settlers. Though Smith won praise as a loyal defender of the Mormon
settlement in Utah, the precise nature of Brigham Young's theocratic
community was unclear: Was Utah an independent nation or a territory
of the United States? During the 1850s, the ambiguous status of Utah
led to an armed conflict between the United States Army and the Utah
militia in which Smith played a central role. Determined to assert
federal control over Utah, in 1857 President James Buchanan ordered
US soldiers to Utah to ensure Mormon loyalty and acquiescence to federal
authority. That July, a force of soldiers that became known as the
Utah Expedition left Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and headed for Utah.
Young feared that the soldiers were not a legitimate federal army
but rather an armed mob of anti-Mormon fanatics. He directed his Mormon
militia to impede the progress of the US Army. Fortunately, the Mormon
militia found that the ill-prepared forces under the leadership of
Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston were easily stymied without having
to resort to actual combat.
Now serving as a major in the Utah militia, Smith was able to capture
and burn two of Sidney's provision trains of 52 freight wagons and
drive off most of the oxen and beef. Brutal weather combined with
the Mormon's effective destruction of his supply lines forced Johnston
to retreat to Fort Bridger, Wyoming. Smith's successful efforts, and
those of other leaders of the Mormon militia, may have kept the conflict
from turning into a full-scale war. By the following spring when Johnston's
army again headed toward Salt Lake City, the passion for war on both
sides had cooled. Brigham Young, who claimed he had always been loyal
to the United States, accepted a new gentile governor for Utah Territory.
If the Mormons had indeed once dreamed of creating an independent
theocratic community in Utah, they now abandoned the idea and largely
accepted federal authority. For his part, Smith went on to play an
important role in expanding Mormon settlement in the West, leading
a successful effort to colonize northern Arizona. He became a forceful,
and some said autocratic, leader of the Mormon settlement at Tuba
City, where he established his Circle S Ranch and may have taken as
many as eight wives. In the 1890s, the Arizona Mormons came into increasing
conflict with Navaho Indians who grazed their sheep on land that the
Mormons claimed as their own. Smith apparently angered the Navaho
by shooting several of their sheep he found grazing on land he claimed.
On this day in 1892, a small band of Navaho retaliated by ambushing
Smith and shooting him to death. He was 62 years old. |
^
1877 ten “Molly Maguires”,
hanged for murder
The nation’s
increasingly embattled coal mines take center stage, as ten members
of the "Molly Maguires" are hung for murder. A strident band of anthracite
miners from Pennsylvania, the "Mollies" had formed a few years earlier
in hopes of improving in the work conditions for their fellow miners.
Indeed, coal miners received scant pay for toiling long hours in hot
and hazardous conditions. The courts and other official channels offered
the miners little refuge: mine operators used well-placed bribes to
skirt around labor regulations and hold government inspectors at bay.
The Mollies, who borrowed their nom
de guerre from a radical Irish mining organization, chucked any notion
of using official channels to effect change. Rather, like their Irish
forebears, they donned women’s clothes and waged a campaign of violence
and intimidation against the mine bosses. At first, the Mollies’ brutal
tactics had their intended impact and struck great fear into the hearts
of Eastern Pennsylvania’s mine officials.
But, management soon fired back and hired an operative from the Pinkerton
Detective Agency to infiltrate the group. The Pinkerton man was able
to marshal enough evidence to bring twenty members of the Mollies
to trial; though some labor historians still dispute the outcome of
the case, ten of the Molly Maguires were nonetheless found guilty
and executed. Duly cowed by this turn of events, the remaining members
of the Molly Maguires swiftly disbanded their organization. |
1876 Antonio López de Santa Anna, 82, Mexican general
(took Alamo)
1828 Leandro Fernández de Moratín,
dramaturgo español.
1820 Aléxis-Thérèse
Petit, Frenchman mathematical physicist born on 02 October
1791.
1812 Johann-Friedrich-August Tischbein, German
painter specialized in Portraits,
born on 09 March 1750. — more
with links to images. |
^
On
a 21 June:
