An industrial heritage revived (Lawrence honors laborer slain in 1912 textile strike)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/09/01/an_industrial_heritage_revived/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed7



(Evan Richman/Globe Staff)
By Eric Moskowitz
Globe Staff / September 1, 2008

LAWRENCE - Under other circumstances, John Ramey could have been remembered as a martyr, an immigrant mill worker speared by a militiaman's bayonet. He was killed in a strike that started over a wage cut of a few pennies a week to laborers who toiled in unsafe conditions and earned barely enough to survive.

But Ramey is hardly remembered at all. No memorial marks the site where the young man was struck down; little is known about him, and even his age is a question mark. For half a century, Lawrence buried the story of Ramey and the textile strike of 1912, one of the most significant in the country's history. Those old enough to have participated spoke little about it, the fear of being branded anti-American lingering even after the textile industry had vanished.

"They stopped talking, and history was being covered over," said Jonas Stundzia, a 54-year-old Lawrence native and local historian who has led a movement to recognize and revive the city's industrial-labor heritage and the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912.

That effort includes establishing an annual Labor Day festival, now in its 24th year, and creating memorials for the three mill workers killed during the strike. Ramey, the third victim to be remembered, will be recognized this morn ing with the dedication of a granite marker at his grave at the city's St. Mary's-Immaculate Conception Cemetery.

In the afternoon, Stundzia will lead a discussion about Ramey at the downtown Lawrence festival, which commemorates the strike and its gains and features folk music, dancing, and family entertainment.

Stundzia's grandmother was a young millworker who was clubbed during the strike by a Harvard student, part of a group of undergraduates who helped the state militia turn back the crowds.

But Stundzia's family scarcely talked about the strike, and in school he learned only that the workers - tens of thousands of whom had taken to the streets in the winter of 1912 to demand better wages and working conditions - were socialists and communists intent on causing upheaval.

FULL 2 page story at link.