Dear Progressive Reader,

The saga of the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago continued this week with the Friday afternoon release of the redacted version of the Justice Department’s affidavit used to secure the search warrant for the raid. Donald Trump, in response, has renewed his call for the appointment of a “special master” to review the seized documents in order to determine if they are indeed secret. It is notable, I think, that he chose the term “special master,” a cryptic court designation, rather than “special prosecutor” or “special counsel”—both of which evoke memories of the Watergate hearings of the 1970s. As cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, all of this simply amounts to bluster and obfuscation since Trump certainly does not really want someone independent who will say that the documents are indeed top secret (as the official stamp on the cover of each already indicates).

This past Thursday was the 101st anniversary of the beginning of what has come to be known as the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, the largest armed labor insurrection in U.S. history. In 2009, the site was delisted from the National Register of Historic Places, but local activists were able to get it restored in June 2018. As Ron Soodalter wrote in the January 2018 issue of The Progressive, “the biggest threat [of the delisting] may be to what Blair Mountain represents.” Indeed, when teachers in West Virginia won their strike in 2018 for a wage increase and a roll-back of other proposed cuts to programs and support, Brandon Weber explained, “One defining factor in this success was the state’s labor history. . . . That sense of solidarity those battles created remains a key part of the people who live and work in West Virginia today.” This militant labor history has continued to inform today’s organizing. As Sarah Jaffe noted in a 2020 article, “When the Mountain State’s teachers went on strike in 2018, they inspired a movement—now they’re showing us how to build a better union.”

New generations of workers and labor historians are working to keep that history alive today. Kim Kelly, author of the 2022 book, Fight Like Hell, told Zach Roberts, “[K]ids don’t know about the battle of Blair Mountain, there was a whole concerted effort to bury that history, keep that history away from younger people and erase the impact that those workers had.” Kelly’s book, like the work of people’s historian Howard Zinn, whose birth centennial was celebrated this week, seeks to showcase the contributions of everyday folks in creating social change and building a more just world. As Saurav Sarkar reports this week, much of that education is finding a home in the organizing work of young activists at Starbucks and other new unionization efforts. “The recent wave of Starbucks workers seeking to join a union shares many characteristics of a mass movement,” he notes.

In other stories on our website this week, Bruce Mirkin tells the story of a trans teenager in Hawaii; Shireen Faisal writes about how she was labeled a “terrorist” for engaging in humanitarian work in Palestine; and Jeff Abbott looks at echoes of authoritarianism growing in Central America. Plus Marqus Cole pens an op-ed noting the shortcomings of the recently signed Inflation Reduction Act in protecting communities of color; Anthony Pahnke describes the ways in which “traditional farming practices offer a template for building a sustainable agriculture industry;” and Dennis Fritz celebrates the overdue victory for veterans of the PACT Act.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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