endless list of my favourite male horror characters:
Kane Hodder as Jason Voorhees
FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD
1988 | dir. John Carl Buechler
On this day, 16 February 1937, a group of predominantly Polish women cigar makers in Detroit sat down demanding a 10% raise, kickstarting a militant wave of sitdown strikes across the industry in the city. The action came just a few days after a historic victory by auto workers who occupied their plant and won recognition for the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.
The women worked in appalling, unsafe conditions, for pay which had been slashed during the great depression, with endemic sexual harassment by foremen. They had requested a pay increase from management, but received no response. The women had also repeatedly approached the American Federation of Labor-affiliated cigar union for assistance, but it had ignored them.
So instead, on February 16, the women walked out themselves, went to the UAW headquarters and sat down inside until a Polish organiser, Stanley Nowak, agreed to help them organise cigar workers across the industry in the city. Within a few hours the strikers had organised themselves, set up committees for formulating demands, and providing food and childcare.
Over the next few days women at five other cigar companies in the city occupied their factories, and held mass meetings and demonstrations. One worker described how the strikers passed the time: “Some of us sitting here are doing fancy knitting work. Others are playing cards. A few are in the ‘kitchen’ making noodles. There is music and the younger girls, with gay cellophane ribbons in their hair, are dancing.“
While a couple of employers settled in early March, the others refused. On March 20 in an attempt to end the strike, police violently raided one of the plants, attacking the women, pulling their hair, tearing their clothing and beating bystanders, including a pregnant woman outside her home. Auto workers then threatened a general strike unless the police violence stopped.
Eventually on April 22, the women won their demands and established their own union. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.1819457841572691/2211564982361973/?type=3
The unsatisfying fact is that even when the police are at your doorstep, they are not always able to protect you. That, despite their good intentions, their presence does not equal safety.
[…]
Increasingly, the police know they are being filmed, but can use the cameras to establish a false narrative. An officer in Baltimore was found to be using his camera to “re-create” the discovery of drugs he claimed to have found earlier. In this case, even though they had Nichols restrained, officers continued to yell out “give me your hands” to justify for the cameras the beating they were giving him.
In the end, the presence of body cameras did nothing to reduce the police use of violence. They did not save his life. It turns out that the hoped for value of deterrence just isn’t there in the ways we imagined. A systematic study of the introduction of body cameras in some neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., showed they made no measurable difference in any aspect of policing. But the city decided to give cameras to all officers anyway because police officers were using them for evidence collection.
Body cameras are not going to save Americans or give us a deeper truth about the world of violence that police inhabit and produce. The truth is already out there in the long history of policing. We merely refuse to look at it. We hide behind empty hopes that a little training, oversight and accountability will somehow transform an institution rooted in the use of violence to maintain systems of inequality. From Ferguson to Minneapolis to Memphis, the demand on the streets is not for more technology for police; it is to dismantle policing and replace it with less harmful alternatives in as many ways as we possibly can.
On this day, 16 February 1943, US-born translator, writer and German anti-Nazi resistance activist Mildred Fish-Harnack was beheaded in Berlin: the only US woman to be executed on dictator Adolf Hitler’s personal orders.
Part of what the Nazis dubbed the “Red Orchestra” of socialist anti-fascist underground activists, she was tried and sentenced to hard labour, but then retried on Hitler’s direction and sentenced to death.
Fish-Harnack and her group assisted Jews and forced labourers, recruited other resistance activists and distributed anti-fascist propaganda.
Learn more about Mildred and her life and activism in our podcast episodes 63-64 in conversation with historian, and Mildred’s great-grandniece: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e63-64-mildred-fish-harnack/ https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2211264352392036/?type=3
