The Minimum Wage Is Very Aptly Named (1961)
SIXTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, ON SEPTEMBER 2, 1961, the federally-mandated minimum wage was increased from $1 an hour to $1.15. Doesn’t sound like a lot of money, does it?
But consider this: If the 1961 minimum wage, a measly buck-fifteen an hour, had been automatically adjusted, just to keep pace with inflation, today’s federal minimum wage would be $12.51.
Which sure beats today’s federal minimum wage, $7.25, which has remained the same for more than 17 years. https://xxxxxx.org/2025-07-18/16-years-without-federal-minimum-wage-hike-outrage
What Does a Non-violent Movement Do About Threats of Violence? (1966)
(The item below describes the resolution of the late-August tension within the Chicago Freedom Movement, presented last week, over whether peaceful demonstrators should defend themselves if violently attacked.)
SIXTY YEARS AGO, ON SEPTEMBER 4, 1966, some of the participants in the summer-long coordinated actions of the Chicago Freedom Movement planned to hold a march through the Chicago suburb of Cicero.
In advance of the demonstration tensions were running high. One anxiety-producing issue concerned the antagonism between the civil rights activists and many of Cicero’s townspeople, because Cicero was well-known to have a lily-white population in a metropolitan area that was 25 percent people of color. Cicero was not only all-White, but it was renowned as having a high concentration of outspoken enemies of any effort to end the racial discrimination that prevented people of color from living in Cicero, despite the Illinois law that banned almost all race-based housing discrimination.
Several Chicago Freedom Movement demonstrations had been attacked already that summer by mobs of bottle- and rock-throwing antagonists. A number of people in Cicero were already threatening to oppose a demonstration with force, so the potential for violence was clear. Cicero and Chicago share a 6-mile-long border.
The planned demonstration was also a source of tension within the Chicago Freedom Movement, because the physical attacks that had occurred and the threats of future violence coming from Cicero had led some of the civil rights activists to say that they would defend themselves if attacked, which was a radical departure from the commitment to nonviolence that was the creed of the largest organizations of civil rights activists.
The groups advocating self-defense were members of the Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Association of Community Teams, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Oakland Committee for Community Improvement, and Deacons for Defense and Justice. When asked to say how they would defend themselves, the self-defense advocates declined to be specific.
Faced with the potential for a major outbreak of politically-inspired violence, the governor of Illinois mobilized hundreds of Illinois State Police and 2,000 members of the Illinois National Guard in addition to large numbers of police from Chicago and Cicero. During a march that covered four miles in two hours, the Guard and police were almost completely successful in minimizing violence by surrounding the demonstrators with solid lines of both police and troops who maintained a neutral zone many yards wide separating marchers from onlookers.
When onlookers attempted to break through the zone, most of them were prevented from doing so by dense lines of officers. About a dozen of the counter-demonstrators were wounded, none seriously, by National Guard bayonets. At one point a Guard officer fired three warning shots into the air, but no one was shot. Police arrested 32 of the counter-demonstrators. None of the civil rights activists ever needed to demonstrate what they intended to do to defend themselves. https://southsideweekly.com/how-the-chicago-freedom-movement-made-way-for-the-fair-housing-act/
If You Haven’t Seen It, Now’s the Time (1966)
SIXTY YEARS AGO, ON SEPTEMBER 8, 1966, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, an ultra-realistic dramatic presentation of the events leading up to the Algerian people's victory over French colonialism, premiered.
If you’re interested in the fight against colonialism, or the struggle against oppression, or having a profound cinematic experience, you won’t be disappointed when you see it. https://theconversation.com/the-battle-of-algiers-an-iconic-film-whose-message-of-hope-still-resonates-today-170121
For more People's History, visithttps://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/
