On this day in Labor History the year was 1903.

That was the day that is remembered in Virginia as the “Wreck of old 97”.

Old 97, also known as the Fast Mail, was a Southern Railway freight train.

It carried the mail from Washington D.C. to Atlanta, Georgia.

The train wreck happened on the leg of the trip from Monroe, Virginia to Spencer, North Carolina.

The train had come in late to Monroe.

It was reported that the railway company ordered the engineer to increase the speed of the train to make up time.

The company had to pay a penalty for delivering the mail late.

But when the trained neared Danville, Virginia the tracks curved at the Stillhouse Trestle Bridge.

The speed was too much.

Despite the engineer’s efforts to slow the train, it careened off the tracks and plummeted to the rocky ravine forty-five feet below.

Eleven of the sixteen people on board the train died, including the conductor, the engineer and the flagman, and both firemen.

The railway company blamed the wreck on the deceased engineer.

Newspapers across the country carried photos of the wreck.

The disaster became the subject of multiple ballads.

One version by Vernon Dalhart in 1924 is thought to be the first million-selling country record in the United States.

Johnny Cash recorded another well-known version of the song.

In 1993 an alternative country band took the name the “Old 97’s” harking back to the disaster and the songs it inspired.

Would you be willing to stand up in solidarity with your fellow workers, even if it cost you your job?

On this day in Labor History the workers at Mersey Docks and Harbor Company in Liverpool, England answered that question.

The year was 1995.

329 Mersey Dock workers refused to cross a picket line that was being walked against another company on the docks.

The workers at Torside had been fired for protesting against erosions in job security and increasingly unpredictable scheduling.

They were speaking out against the casualization of their labor.

When the Mersey Dock workers would not cross the Torside picket line, they too were fired.

Dock workers across the world stood up in solidarity with the Mersey workers against this unjust treatment.

They knew if it could happen in Liverpool, it might happen anywhere.

Pickets sprung up from Norway to Japan, from Australia to Italy and into the United States.

It was a global outpouring of solidarity.

The strike wore on for 850 days.

One year in to the strike, dockworkers held an international day of action in support of the Liverpool workers.

Finally, two-and-a-half years after they were fired, the dockworkers agreed to a settlement.

They did not get back their jobs.

But they did get severance pay.

A film was made about the struggle.

The proceeds were used to purchase a bar in Liverpool.

It is known as the Dockers Pub, and has become a space for working class organizing.

The International Dockworkers Council was also born from this strike.

Today the council has 90,000 members—a lasting movement of solidarity.

Twenty years after the strike, dockworkers from across the world gathered in Liverpool to remember the struggle.

On this day in Labor History the year was 1789.

That was the day that the United States Congress officially created the United States army.

Not everyone agreed that the U.S. should have a standing army.

Two years earlier, at the meeting that drafted the U.S. Constitution, James Madison warned against a permanent federal army.

He told those at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”

Since Madison was a strong proponent of a centralized federal government, his caution about the army was noteworthy.

Perhaps these warnings is why it took Congress until the last day of their session to finally approve the measure.

In fact, President George Washington had to write Congress not once but twice to get them to act on the issue.

Once it was approved, the first standing Army had about 800 members.

By comparison, in 2015 the Army had just under half a million in active duty soldiers.

To supplement the small army, Congress also made a provision for the President to call up troops from State militias.

A stated purpose for such call ups, was “protecting the inhabitants of the frontiers of United States from hostile incursions of the Indians.”

While in federal service, the State militias were supposed to receive “the same as the pay and subsistence” as the regular army.

One time various State militias were used was for the forced removal of the Cherokee people from the Southeast on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.

State militias were also deployed to break up labor strikes, such as in the Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania in 1892.

On this day in Labor History the year was 1919.

That was the day that began the Elaine Massacre.

The massacre took place in Arkansas, where more than 100 black farmers and sharecroppers were gunned down for daring to organize their labor.

The Year before, a black farmer by the name of Robert L. Hill had founded the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America.

Union members pooled their money to purchase land.

They also hired a lawyer to sue planters who did not give black tenant cotton farmers their fair share of the profits.

The group grew in membership in the Arkansas delta region, including near the town of Elaine in Philips County.

But white landowners would not allow this challenge to their power.

Armed white militias came to a church where the union was holding a meeting.

The black attendees were also armed.

Gunfire broke out.

In response, white posses and federal troops unleashed a wave of terror across Philips County.

Hundreds of black residents were arrested.

At least 100 black Arkansans were killed.

Some estimates of those murdered is considerable higher.

Five white people also died.

122 black men and women were charged with murder.

Twelve were given the death sentence.

No white vigilante was ever charged.

The convicted African Americans appealed their cases.

One appeal for six of the defendants went all the way to the US Supreme Court, where it was overturned in a landmark ruling.

The year of 1919 was one of the deadliest years of violence against African Americans in U.S. history.

Civil Rights activist James Weldon Johnson called those bloody months the “Red Summer.”

Twenty-six race riots left thousands of African Americans homeless and hundreds dead from Chicago to Washington D.C. to Omaha

On this day in Labor History the year was 1851.

That was the day that William Henry, a black cooper, or barrel maker who went by the name of Jerry was arrested in Syracuse, New York.

First he was told that he was being arrested for theft.

But then he learned that federal marshals had arrested him for violating the Fugitive Slave Law, passed the year before.

Jerry had escaped slavery in Missouri.

The anti-slavery Liberty Party was holding its convention in nearby church.

When word came about Jerry’s arrest, a crowd rushed to release him.

Once released he was quickly recaptured and returned to custody.

But then a large crowd, numbering more than 2,000 gathered to free Jerry from the office where he was being held.

According to research done by the Syracuse University Library, the first person into the office was J. M. Clappe, an iron worker likely chosen for his brawn.

The crowd was able to free Jerry and hide him until he could escape into Canada.

Clappe also had to flee to Canada to avoid arrest, along with eight others.

Nineteen people were indicted for participating in the rescue.

Only one person was convicted, and he died before he could appeal.

In turn, the abolitionists won an indictment against the marshal who had arrested Jerry.

They charged him with kidnapping.

Although the marshal was acquitted, it gave the abolitionists a chance to publicly challenge the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Each year until 1858 a Jerry Rescue celebration commemorated the event.

Abolitionists referred to the “Jerry Level” as a standard for justice.

In 2001 a monument to the rescue was dedicated in Clinton Square, in downtown Syracuse New York.

On this day in Labor History the year was 1935.

That was the year that San Diego hosted the California Pacific International Exposition, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke the most memorable words about the rights of workers to organize.

The goal of the exposition was to show case San Diego, and to boost the local economy, which had fallen on hard times in the Great Depression.

The exposition was held in Balboa Park.

Exhibits included history, science, industry and culture.

To prepare for the expo, improvements were made to the park, paid for by the Works Progress Administration.

The WPA was a New Deal era program designed to put people back to work on public infrastructure projects.

The expo kicked off in May, and ran for 377 days, with a break during the winter months.

More than 7 million people visited the park for the expo.

Two of those visitors was President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor.

As part of his trip, the President gave a speech to 60,000 people at Balboa Stadium.

Earlier that year had signed the Wagner Act otherwise known as the National Labor Relation Act, which guaranteed private sector workers the right to joins and form a union.

The President spent part of his Expo speech celebrating that achievement.

He declared, “a changing civilization has raised new problems with respect to the relationship between the employer and the employed. It is now beyond partisan controversy that it is a fundamental individual right of a worker to associate himself with other workers and to bargain collectively with his employer.”

President Roosevelt went on to acknowledge, “New laws, in themselves, do not bring a millennium.”

The passage of the law helped to launch a new wave of union organizing across U.S. industry.

On this day in Labor History the year was 1961.

That was the day when Herbert Lee was murdered just outside of Liberty, Mississippi.

He was a successful black cotton farmer, who became active in efforts to register black voters.

Lee had nine children.

He was one of the few area black farmers with a vehicle.

This made him very valuable to the voter registration movement.

Lee would drive Bob Moses from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee around Amite County to reach unregistered voters.

It was dangerous work to register black share croppers and farmers in rural Mississippi.

Attempts by black residents to gain legal or economic equality were met with threats and violence.

On the morning of his murder, Lee had come to the Westbrook Cotton Gin outside of Liberty to drop off a truck load cotton.

There he was met by a childhood friend, Mississippi State Representative, E. H. Hurst.

Hurst came up to the truck and started shouting at Lee.

He then took out a gun and shot Herbert Lee in the head.

Witnesses stated that Lee had brandished a tire iron at Hurst.

Hurst claimed self-defense.

A jury declared the murder a justifiable homicide.

Louis Allen, a black farmer and timber worker, was one who had testified about witnessing the shooting.

Later he recanted his testimony, saying he had lied about Lee threatening Hurst because he feared for his life.

After Allen began to talk about what he saw that day, he became the victim of harassment and beatings.

Finally, on January 31, 1964 he too was gunned down in his driveway.

No one was every convicted or arrested for his murder.