Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Between Rock and a Hard Place.
On this holiday Monday: First, if you missed yesterday’s post, here are 15 varied songs marking the day. Next: My “Memorial Day Massacre,” which came out over PBS one year ago, airs today over WTTW in Chicago at 5:30 pm and 10:00 pm, and in many others cities today and the rest of this week. But it has also been streaming over PBS.org and PBS apps for free for quite some time – but that ends this coming Friday. So if you have not watched, here’s your “final” chance for maybe quite awhile. It’s 27 minutes long, and narrated by Josh Charles, with an assist from my old pal Studs Terkel.
As I have written in the past: It explores the murder of ten steel strikers and labor activists (most shot in the back) during a Memorial Day march in Chicago in 1937. And then, how the only film footage of the tragedy was suppressed until a muckraking reporter and crusading U.S. Senator brought it to light. Still, some movie theaters and distributors refused to air the newsreel. And no cops were punished. But it had significant influence, to this day, on labor movements in America.