The little known history of the massacre that occurred in Milwaukee, when 7,000 building workers and 5,000 Polish workers demanded the eight-hour work day.
The deadly stand-off between workers and the National Guard was the culmination of events that began on Saturday May 1, 1886.
A historical marker, pictured above, is located at Russel and Superior on Jones Island in Bay View. It commemorates the Bay View Massacre.
The proclamation of the 1883 Congress of the anarchist International Working Peoples' Association, taken from the English edition of Freiheit, 27 December 1890, by Johann Joseph Most.
In the Declaration of Independence of the United States we read: "When in a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."
An article looking at the ancient pagan roots of Mayday, through the Haymarket martyrs to International Workers Day and the UK anti-capitalists in the late 1990s.
The history of the world holiday on the 1st May - May Day, or International Workers Day, held in commemoration of four anarchists executed for struggling for an 8-hour day.
Originally a pagan holiday, the roots of the modern May Day bank holiday are in the fight for the eight-hour working day in Chicago in 1886, and the subsequent execution of innocent anarchist workers.
Yet your employer told you that it was overproduction which made him close up. Who cared for the bitter tears and heart-pangs of your loving wife and helpless children, when you bid them a loving "God bless you" and turned upon the tramper's road to seek employment elsewhere? I say, who cared for those heartaches and pains? You were only a tramp now, to be execrated and denounced as a "worthless tramp and a vagrant" by that very class who had been engaged all those years in robbing you and yours...
An article by Lucy E. Parsons in anarchist magazine Alarm, October 4, 1884. Also printed and distributed as a leaflet by the International Working People's Association.