Today in Labor History April 19, 1506: Catholics tortured and burned hundreds of Jews in what became known as The Lisbon Massacre. This occurred thirty years before the Portuguese Inquisition and nine years after Jews were forced to convert by King Manuel I. The massacre occurred during a drought and a plague epidemic. It started when someone at church claimed to have seen a miracle: the face of Jesus on the altar. However, a New Christian (i.e., a converted Jew) said he thought it was merely the reflection of a candle. They took him outside, beat him to death, and then went after anyone else suspected of being a Jew.
April 19, 1903: The Kishinev pogrom occurred in Bessarabia. At the time, Bessarabia was part of the Russian Empire. Today it is part of Moldova. During the pogrom, local Christians killed 49 Jews, raped many Jewish women and destroyed over 1500 homes. The incident led Zionist founder, Theodor Herzl, to propose the Uganda Scheme for resettlement of the Jews in Palestine.
1910s
Today in Labor History April 19, 1911: More than 6,000 immigrant workers began the Great Furniture Strike in Grand Rapids, Michigan. By the late 1800s, Grand Rapids had become the furniture making capital of the U.S. In 1890, the city had about 90,000 residents, 33,000 of whom were recent immigrants. And 4,000 of them worked in the city’s 85 furniture factories. By 1910, the industry employed over 7,000 workers. Most worked six 10-hour shifts for less than $2 a day, or about $45 in today’s dollars. One of the owners, Harry Widdicomb, tried to drive scabs to his factory, right through the crowd of strikers. They pelted his car with rocks and bricks. Police beat people with clubs and firefighters fought them back with hoses. But by evening, they had busted every window in his factory. (For a more detailed look at this strike, click here).
April 19, 1913: Modestino Valentino was shot and killed by company detectives during a conflict between IWW strikers and scabs in Patterson, N.J.
1920s
Today in Labor History April 19, 1927: The authorities sentenced Mae West to 10 days in jail for obscenity, for her play, “Sex.”
1940s
April 19, 1943: The 50,000 Jews remaining in Warsaw began a desperate and heroic attempt to resist Nazi deportation to extermination camps. Their armed insurgency became known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. There had been over 3 million Jews living in Poland prior to the Nazi occupation. The Nazis rounded them up and forced them into crowded ghettos. The Warsaw ghetto had 250,000-300,000 Jews living in abominable conditions. Roughly this same number of Jews were slaughtered at the Treblinka concentration camp within the two months the Nazis started deporting them. The Jews managed to stockpile Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, military uniforms, and even a few pistols and some explosives. However, the resistance was crushed by the Nazis on May 16.
Today in Labor History April 19, 1943: Albert Hoffman deliberately dosed himself with acid, three days after accidentally discovering its hallucinogenic effects. The amount he took on purpose was far more powerful than what he had expected.
1960s
April 19, 1960: Korean students led nation-wide pro-democracy protests against President Rhee that forced him to resign.