Today in History August 30, 1797: Mary Shelley, English novelist and playwright was born. She is most famous for her novel, “Frankenstein.” However, Shelley wrote several other novels. She was also a political radical throughout her life. Shelley married the romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelly. Her father was the early anarchist philosopher, William Godwin. And her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a writer and a feminist activist.
1800s-1810s
Today in Labor History August 30, 1800: Gabriel Prosser postponed his planned slave rebellion in Richmond, Virginia. The authorities still arrested and executed him. While the revolt never occurred, it was the one event that most directly confronted the founding fathers with the enormous gulf between their ideal of liberty and their sleazy accommodations to slavery.
Today in Labor History August 30, 1813: The Fort Mims massacre took place during the Creek War. The Red Sticks faction of the Creek Nation stormed the Fort Mims and defeated the militia garrison. Afterward, they massacred nearly all the remaining Creek métis, white settlers, and militia at the fort. Their victory spread panic throughout the Southeast. Settlers fled. Thousands of whites fled their settlements for Mobile, which struggled to accommodate them. The Red Stick victory was one of the greatest Native American victories. They were helped by the fact that Federal troops were bogged down fighting the War of 1812. However, local state militias, commanded by Major General Andrew Jackson and allied with Cherokees, ultimately defeated the Red Sticks Creek faction at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, ending the Creek War.
Margaret Mitchell cited the Fort Mims massacre in Gone with the Wind. Grandma Fontaine shares her memories of her entire family dying in the the massacre as a lesson to Scarlett.
1830s-1900s
Today in Labor History August 30, 1834: Union delegates from New York, Boston, Philadelphia and other East Coast cities met to form the National Trades Union, which united craft unions to oppose the wealth of a tiny minority. Although they were active for just a few years, the NTU paved the way for more than 60 new unions.
Today in Labor History August 30, 1909: Virginia Lee Burton, American author and illustrator was born. She wrote two books I loved as a child: “Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel” (1939) and “The Little House” (1943).
1940s
Today in Labor History August 30, 1948: Fred Hampton revolutionary activist and chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party was born. He founded the anti-racist, anti-class Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that included Black Panthers, Young Patriots (which organized poor whites), and the Young Lords (which organized Hispanics), and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change. In December 1969, the Chicago police & FBI drugged Hampton, shot him and killed him in his bed during a predawn raid. They sprayed more than 90 gunshots throughout his apartment. They also killed Black Panther Mark Clark and wounded several others. In January 1970, a jury concluded that Hampton’s and Clark’s deaths were justifiable homicides.
Stephen King refers to Hampton in his novel “11/22/63” (2012). In that book, a character suggests that if you could travel back in time to prevent John F. Kennedy’s assassination, it could have a ripple effect that also prevented Hampton’s assassination.
1970s
Today in Labor History August 30, 1971: Ten empty school buses were blown up in Pontiac, Michigan to prevent the daily bussing of 8,700 children to achieve racial balance in the city’s schools.
Today in Labor History August 30, 1974: A powerful bomb exploded at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters in Tokyo. 8 died and 378 were injured. The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, a radical far-left organization carried out the attack because they were supplying the U.S. during the Vietnam War. The EAAJAF was an anarchist-inspired group that espoused revolution against the Japanese state, corporations, and symbols of Japanese imperialism. They committed a series of bombings during the early 1970s until the Japanese authorities arrested most of its membership in 1975. Several members were sentenced to death
The EAAJAF lacked centralized leadership. Members chose to work by day as normal corporate employees and prepare their operations by night, donating half their income to the cause. In contrast, other groups, like the Japanese Red Army, raised funds through illegal means including bank robberies. As they studied the history of aggression by Japan against Korea and the Ainu, the EAAJAF acquired its personal “anti-Japanese ideology.” They considered not only those in power, but also Japanese corporations and laborers as “perpetrators of imperialist aggression” and believed that they were acceptable targets for attack.