The first vice-president of Texas was a Mexican.

Lorenzo de Zavala, born on this day in 1788, fought for the independence of México from Spain during the 1810s and 1820s, then, during the 1830s, he fought for the independence of Texas from México.

Few people better represent how migration and diversity have been essential to the American republics ever since their revolutionary beginnings.

Lorenzo de Zavala

Zavala was born in Yucatán in what was then the Spanish-ruled colony of ‘New Spain.’ He was descended from colonists from the Basque region, and his dad was a lawyer for the colonial authorities.

Zavala, on the other hand, became a revolutionary after the Spanish American Wars of Independence broke out in 1808.

New Spain actually remained, for the most part, under Spanish control during the 1810s, after the popular revolution led by Miguel Hidalgo was crushed by the colonial government.

But Spain was having its own democratic revolution during these years, too, as part of the popular resistance to Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula.

Mexican radicals like Zavala took advantage of this opening to agitate for more decolonisation within the Spanish empire.

Zavala began publishing a number of newspapers calling for popular sovereignty and other democratic reforms in New Spain.

Zavala’s activism landed him in trouble once reactionaries briefly regained power in Spain after 1814, and he was thrown in jail.

But the return to power of the Spanish liberals in 1820 gave Zavala the opportunity to be elected to the new imperial parliament in Madrid, where he pushed for the equality of the American provinces.

Many Central and South American revolutionaries in the 19th century viewed the United States as a model of modern, democratic government

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Zavala’s experiment with Spanish parliamentarism didn’t last long either, though.

In 1821, when Agustín de Iturbide, a Mexican-born general in the Spanish army, switched sides and declared for Mexican independence, Zavala went back across the Atlantic to join the revolution at home.

Zavala became a member of the radical wing of the new Mexican congress, favouring republican politics and the devolution of power to the local states.

When Iturbide, corrupted by power, declared himself ‘Emperor’ of México, Zavala became an important leader in the movement that quickly overthrew him and created a new republic in 1823.

Then, in 1824, Zavala was one of the main writers of the new Mexican constitution, supporting measures which included popular sovereignty and the abolition of slavery.

But soon enough, Zavala was on the wrong side of the regime again. When Mexican conservatives regained control of the government in 1829, he was forced into exile.

Zavala went north, to travel the United States of America.

Zavala wrote the abolition of slavery into the Mexican constitution in 1824, something the US would only achieve with the Thirteenth Amendment over 40 years later

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The young American Republic had been a valuable staging post for Mexican revolutionaries during the 1810s and 1820s, where they were allowed to gather and organise.

Lots of Mexicans, like Zavala, viewed the US as the model of a modern, democratic republic, and he went there to try to learn lessons for how to beat the conservatives and monarchists at home in Mexico.

But the conservative wing of Mexican politics, now led by Antonio López de Santa Anna during the mid-1830s, seemed stronger than ever.

So, in 1835, Zavala went to Texas.

He joined the rebellion against the Mexican government there, which was being led by Anglo-American settlers like Stephen Austin and Sam Houston.

But Zavala, perhaps naively, wasn’t fighting for the sort of US invasion and conquest that actually later took place in the 1840s, and its ideology of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ racism.

Initially, Zavala hoped that the Texan uprising could inspire and be part of an all-Mexico democratic revolution.

Once it became obvious that wasn’t happening, though, Zavala tried to turn Texas into a model liberal republic in North America, independent of both México and the US, and showing the possibility for a multicultural republicanism in the Americas.

WEB Du Bois wrote movingly of the contradictions between the US's 18th and 19th century ideals of freedom and republicanism, and the reality of discrimination for non-whites

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Zavala was chosen to be vice-president of the ‘Lone Star State,’ he designed its flag, and he co-wrote its constitution, making Zavala the only person to ever author two different national constitutions.

Zavala died of pneumonia in 1836, before Texan independence collapsed into US expansionism and ‘manifest destiny.’

Embodying the cosmopolitan, migratory, and frequently utopian politics of the age of revolutions, Lorenzo de Zavala also symbolises the multicultural founding of what became the United States.

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The Native American radical who led the fight for the return of indigenous lands and self-government

“The Iroquois are struggling for a renaissance. If we were permitted the return of self-rule, we could place before the world an example of perfect government.”

Indigenous resistance in the United States did not end with the military defeat of warriors like Tecumseh and Crazy Horse during the nineteenth century.

Indigenous radicals carried on the struggle by different means in the early twentieth century.

Laura Cornelius Kellogg was born on this day in 1880, on the Oneida Indian Reservation in Wisconsin.

Kellogg helped found the modern American Indian movement.

Kellogg fought for sovereignty, tribal autonomy and self-government in Native American lands

Kellogg was descended from respected Oneida chiefs like Daniel Bread, who had found new land for their people after they were ethnically cleansed from New York state by European settlers during the 1820s and 1830s.

Looking back to such ancestors, Laura Kellogg had immense pride in her Iroquois Nations, specifically, and Native America in general.

She would never accept the colonial lie that the indigenous people of North America were less civilised than Europeans.

Despite the fact she excelled at several U.S. educational institutions, including Stanford and Columbia, Kellogg always maintained that:

“…there are old Indians who have never seen the inside of a classroom whom I consider far more educated than the young Indian with his knowledge of Latin and algebra.”

This recognition of the enduring value of indigenous culture and knowledge set Kellogg apart from some of her contemporaries in the American Indian movement. 

Tecumseh fought against the expansion of the United States onto Native American land, but the struggle continued long after his death in 1812

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Other indigenous activists argued that the way to dignity and freedom for Native Americans was in adopting purely Western values.

But Laura Kellogg had seen the values of the modern U.S. in the ravages of industrial capitalism in New York, impoverishing the working-class.

What sort of ‘civilisation’ was this to follow?

“No, I cannot see that everything the white man does is to be copied.”

Instead, Kellogg argued that the U.S. could do with being ‘civilised’ by indigenous cultural practices.

When white women won the right to vote nationally in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Kellogg pointed out that Iroquois society, with its system of clan mothers, had included women in the political process since long before Europeans invaded North America:

“It is a cause of astonishment to us that you white women are only now, in this twentieth century, claiming what has been the Indian woman’s privilege as far back as history traces.”

Kellogg also co-founded, in 1911, the Society of American Indians, which helped to promote Native American identity and cultural activity in the U.S.

Instead of the imagined deficiencies of indigenous culture, then, Kellogg argued that the impoverishment of modern Native Americans was due to the political economy of settler colonialism.

Specifically, it was a matter of land.

Laura Kellogg inherited the radical legacy of Native American warriors and activists like Crazy Horse

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The Iroquois, like all the other indigenous peoples under U.S. rule, had had most of their land stolen from them by European settlers since the late eighteenth century, including by gross violation of treaties signed with the U.S. federal government.

In 1922, a New York assemblyman called Edward Everett published a report – quickly repudiated by his white colleagues – claiming that the Six Nations of the Iroquois were entitled to 6 million acres of land in New York state due to illegal land theft since 1784.

Laura Kellogg spent the 1910s and 1920s lobbying the federal government to return those indigenous lands.

She believed that, with more land and more political self-government, indigenous communities in the U.S. could achieve economic self-sufficiency and cultural resilience.

Kellogg even took some ideas from the contemporary ‘garden city movement’ in European urban planning, which aimed for an ideal balance between rural and urban life, rather than the unhinged destructiveness and misery of full-scale capitalist industrialisation.

Kellogg's legacy lives on in contemporary movements to protect indigenous land, like the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline

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Kellogg’s vision of revitalised Native American communities, embracing their own rich cultural traditions and self-governing the economic resources of their restored lands, hoped for a major indigenous revival in the U.S. after centuries of conquest, genocide, and marginalisation.

Kellogg’s specific plan was not realised due to the reactionary opposition of state governments and land-hungry corporations in places like Oklahoma and New York.

But she remains a crucial and often forgotten precursor of the radical American Indian Movement of the later twentieth century, as the struggle carried on.

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The US doesn't have a great reputation for the amount of holidays its workers typically get to take.

But the government actually recognises 11 calendar days as federal holidays (Canada 12!), which is a darn sight more than the UK's paltry 8 (apparently only Mexico has fewer).

Labor Day is one I'd never heard of.

(I will try, for the rest of this email, to spell 'labour' without the 'u' so beloved on my side of the Atlantic).

National workers' days the world over are typically around 1st May, so why is North America so different?

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Labor Day became an official federal public holiday in both the US and Canada back in 1894, at a time when the power of organised labor was growing across the Western world.

About 160 countries around the world celebrate 'International Workers Day' on 1st May as their version of 'Labor Day', but even though that date was inspired by Chicago's Haymarket Affair, joining everyone else seems to have been too conformist for the individualist US.

Instead the US and Canadian labor movements promoted their own early September date.

Depending on who you believe, the American workers' holiday was either the idea of Mathew Maguire, secretary of the Central Labor Union, or the funny-coincidence-similarly-named Peter J. McGuire, vice president of the American Federation of Labor.

I love this idea that you can put forward the radical notion that everyone should get an extra holiday, and become famous simply for that, with people writing emails about you centuries later.

"Let it hearby be noted, that I, Luke Pearce, propose my birthday, 20th November, as an international annual public holiday for all. Let people exchange Radical Tea Towels in celebration."

Don't let some other guy with the mistaken 'Pierce' spelling muscle in on the credit for that one.

Chicago's Haymarket Affair, where police shot at a crowd of protesting workers, led the Second International to designate 1st May as International Workers' Day

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Anyway, whether it was Mathew Maguire's idea of commemorating and repeating a successful public parade of labor organizations in New York City in September 1882, or Peter J. McGuire's idea of copying Toronto's labor celebrations which he'd seen in July 1882, the suggestion of an American Labor Day in early September caught on.

Oregon was the first state to make it an official public holiday in 1887. Montreal, Quebec made it a civic holiday in 1889.

The federal governments of both the US and Canada recognized Labor Day in 1894, though that technically only made it a holiday for federal government workers.

Over the years all the states followed Oregon's lead.

The textile workers' strike of 1934 was the largest in US history at the time

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Here's a more controversial theory for why North America's Labor Day ended up in September rather than in May like almost everyone else in the world.

US President Grover Cleveland, a conservative Democrat, had decided to give a green light to the idea of a holiday to commemorate workers as a way to pacify labor unrest following the Pullman Strike of 1894.

However, he was concerned that a May holiday might lend credence to the Haymarket affair and riots, and strengthen the socialist and anarchist groups who backed International Workers' Day.

A holiday on the first Monday in September, nestled conveniently between Independence Day and Thanksgiving, could be a less inflammatory alternative.

One that perhaps distracted from the antagonism between government and unions which had emerged in the 1880s and was symbolised by the violence in Chicago in May 1886.

So Cleveland gave workers a holiday, but on a date of his choosing. Canada, with its close cultural and labor ties to the US, followed suit.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world went on to mark those workers tragically killed in Chicago each year in May.

America remembers its own workers today.

The rest of the world commemorated American workers four months ago.

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The Latina activist who became a hero of the American labor movement

Cesar Chavez tends to dominate the popular memory of Latina/Latino activism in the U.S. during the twentieth century.

But he wasn’t alone.

Chavez stood on the shoulders of giants who’d gone before. And few were as important as Luisa Moreno, born on this day in 1907.

Chavez was one of the most prominent Latino activists in the 20th century, but Luisa Moreno was also a leading light of labor activism

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Moreno, like many others in the history of the American labor movement, wasn’t born in the U.S.

She was born in Guatemala, and into the Guatemalan elite.

But Moreno never felt at home in the ruling class. At the age of just 19, she gave up on her family’s wealth and moved to revolutionary Mexico.

From México, Moreno soon continued her transnational journey to New York City, where she began her career as a labor radical.

Moreno arrived in New York just in time for the Wall Street Crash.

The Great Depression threw Moreno’s young family, along with millions of other working-class Americans, into economic hardship.

But it also opened the curtain on a decade of labor radicalism the likes of which the U.S. had never seen, and Luisa Moreno was soon on the frontlines of it all.

Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath drew attention to the impact of the Great Depression on working people

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In 1930, like many other Americans during this period, especially among racialized parts of the working class, Moreno joined the U.S. Communist Party to fight for workers’ emancipation, remaining an active member until 1935.

Moreno also became a highly-skilled union organizer.

In ‘Spanish Harlem’ – so-called for its large Latina/Latino population – where Moreno was working at a garment factory to support her daughter and unemployed husband, she organized her fellow workers into a labor union.

Soon enough, Moreno was scouted by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which recruited her as a full-time organizer.

Moreno was a rare talent in her ability to organize sections of the American working class marginalized by their race and gender. In Florida, for instance, she organized Latina and African-American women in the cigar industry.

Moreno began moving westward during the later 1930s, organizing food-processing workers in Texas, before she arrived in California, where she made a base in San Diego.

In 1939, Luisa Moreno convened the first ever Latina/Latino civil rights assembly

California was the major hub of Latina/Latino activism in the mid-century U.S., and Luisa Moreno’s work became increasingly bound up with the wider struggle against white supremacy.

Moreno helped to organize the ‘Congress of Spanish-speaking Peoples’ in 1939 in California, the first ever Latina/Latino civil rights organization in the U.S.

In 1942, Moreno campaigned in defense of a group of Latino men falsely accused of a murder by the LAPD – the Sleepy Lagoon Trial.

Moreno also always insisted on agitating for the entire American working class, including its immigrant workers who’d not yet been allowed citizenship by the state.

"These people are not aliens. They have contributed their endurance, sacrifices, youth and labor to the Southwest. Indirectly, they have paid more taxes than all the stockholders of California’s industrialised agriculture, the sugar companies and the large cotton interests, that operate or have operated with the labor of Mexican workers."

After the Second World War, as McCarthyism launched a war against working-class labor activism in the U.S., Luisa Moreno was made to suffer for her own non-citizen status, and for her track record of solidarity and political courage.

In 1950, after she refused to collaborate in the persecution of another labor organizer, Moreno was deported to México.

After some years working as a teacher in revolutionary Cuba, Moreno eventually resettled in her birth country of Guatemala, where she died in 1992, a hero-in-exile of the U.S. working class.

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Native Americans were key allies in the struggle for women's suffrage in the United States

On the 18th of August, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect when it was ratified by the last of the holdout states.

The Amendment prohibited states from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex, effectively recognising American women’s right to vote after a century of widespread disenfranchisement.

This was the culmination of first-wave feminist activism in the U.S.

The struggle for women's suffrage in the United States involved a huge coalition of different activists

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But the women’s suffrage movement had not carried on its struggle in isolation.

Since it broke onto the political scene at Seneca Falls in 1848, the American feminist movement had made a habit of building coalitions with other oppressed groups in the U.S.

Nineteenth-century feminists often joined abolitionists in the struggle for black freedom, and vice-versa.

And the women’s suffrage movement worked together with socialist and labour activists, on the basis of a shared commitment to human equality.

But one of the suffrage movement’s most significant alliances was with the anticolonial struggle of Native Americans.

In the long fight for the Nineteenth Amendment, Native American women were on the frontline.

Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were keynote speakers at the Seneca Falls Convention which launched the women's suffrage movement in the United States

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In the first instance, Native American societies were seen by – and shown to – early white feminists as an alternative, non-patriarchal model of social organisation

The very societies unjustly conquered by the U.S. in the name of ‘civilisation’ were actually more civilised than their conqueror, insofar as indigenous women were not denied an equal role in political and social life on account of their gender.

Several of the Seneca Falls Convention pioneers, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, visited the nearby Iroquois communities in New York state, and they marvelled at the political rights of women there.

The relatively egalitarian model of gender relations practised by such indigenous societies had a lasting impact on several white feminists during the suffrage struggle.

In Oregon, a campaign to build a statue of Sacagawea of the Lemhi Shoshone tribe, to recognise her as a founding hero of the American Republic, sparked the suffrage movement in that state.

And the New York suffragist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, saw the Iroquois as an example of how egalitarian gender relations led to social and international peace.

As Louise McDonald Herne of the Mohawk Nation reflected on the eventual passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, it was Native American women who had:

“showed white women what freedom and liberty really looked like.”

The National American Women's Suffrage Association helped adopted Sacagawea as a symbol of women's independence

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But far from being just a source of inspiration, Native Americans were also active participants in the struggle for women’s suffrage.

In Oklahoma, in 1904, the Chickasaw Nation agreed to work with that state’s Woman Suffrage Association.

And individual Native American women were also active suffragists, like Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin of the Métis Turtle Mountain Band, who took part in the 1913 Women's March in Washington D.C.

But despite their contribution to the struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment left Native American women behind.

As the Yankton Sioux activist Zitkala-Sa pointed out, indigenous women were still not allowed to vote after 1920 because, like indigenous men, they were denied the status and rights of U.S. citizens.

Similarly, the Nineteenth Amendment had failed black women across the U.S. South, where they continued to be barred from voting for decades by racist state governments.

The Nineteenth Amendment had not resolved the gendered injustices of American society rooted in colonial oppression and racism.

Even after a 1924 law was passed to expand Native American citizenship, many indigenous women had to continue struggling for their right to vote, against racist state laws, until the 1950s.

The Nineteenth Amendment was a major step – but hardly the last step – on the road to the liberation of all women in the United States.

And the same multiracial and intersectional solidarity which helped to win the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 remains the best bet for defending and expanding equality today.

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On this day in 1918, Albert "Ginger" Goodwin was shot dead by a policeman on Vancouver Island, catalysing the Canadian labour movement

“...we know that all this misery is the outcome of someone's carelessness, and that ‘someone’ is the capitalists, those who own the machinery of production...”

In May 1887, Albert “Ginger” Goodwin was born in the village of Treeton in Yorkshire, England.

Thirty-one years later, on this day in 1918, he was shot dead by a policeman on Vancouver Island, Canada, and his death sparked into life the radical Canadian labour movement.

An organiser for the Socialist Party of Canada, Ginger Goodwin fought for workers' rights and unionisation

During the early twentieth century, the Canadian working class was very cosmopolitan, including many migrant workers in its ranks.

One of these was Albert Goodwin, creatively nicknamed “Ginger” for his red hair...

In 1906, having already worked for several years as a miner in Yorkshire, Goodwin emigrated to Nova Scotia to find work in the coalmines of Glace Bay.

A few years later, Goodwin crossed to the Pacific coast of Canada, to work for the Canadian Collieries company in British Columbia.

It was in Cumberland, BC, that Ginger Goodwin became active in labour organising, too.

The mining sector has often been a seedbed of working-class radicalism.

Life as a worker down the mines, digging up resources for the profit of the mine-owners aboveground, has a way of making obvious the exploitation of the working class.

Canada has a rich history of radical struggle, including the Canadian soldiers who fought in the Spanish Civil War

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Albert Goodwin was an organiser of the 1912-14 Coal Miners’ Strike in British Columbia, fighting for union recognition and safer working conditions (mining was often allowed to be fatal for workers by bosses only concerned with their own profit).

But the strike was defeated, and Goodwin was blacklisted in Cumberland for his troubles. Yet the experience of the strike only deepened his commitment to class struggle.

In the midst of the Cumberland strike, Goodwin became a socialist.

He realised that localised strikes alone were not enough. The abhorrent conditions imposed on miners by their bosses were a problem of the system of capitalism in Canada and the wider world as a whole, and it needed a systemic solution:

“To throw this system over we have got to organize as a class and fight them as class against class... and our weapons are education, organization and agitation... and the principles of Socialism.”

Blacklisted in Cumberland, Goodwin moved to Trail, BC, where he found work as a smelter and became an organiser in the Mining and Smelter Workers’ Union.

Goodwin also became an activist for the Socialist Party of Canada (est. 1904), running in the 1916 provincial elections, albeit without success.

In the context of the First World War, radical socialists in Canada, like their comrades in the United States, were outspoken critics of the conflict as a militaristic and imperialist project in which the workers of the world had no interest.

Goodwin therefore resisted going to the war as a conscientious objector:

“War is simply part of the process of capitalism. Big financial interests are playing the game. They’ll reap the victory, no matter how the war ends.”

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was catalysed by the death of Ginger Goodwin a year earlier

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Goodwin continued his labour activism in Canada during the war, too.

In November 1917, he helped call a strike for the Eight-Hour-Day at the smelting plants in Trail.

But then, very conveniently, the state moved to conscript Goodwin and a number of other labour activists to fight and probably die in the Canadian armies in Europe.

True to his antiwar and anti-militarist principles, Goodwin repeatedly appealed against his conscription ruling, without success.

Then, around April or May 1918, Goodwin sought refuge in the Cumberland Hills of Vancouver Island with a number of other draft resisters.

Aided by the local community, the men found shelter near Comox Lake until armed police moved in to the area to locate and arrest them.

Then, on 27 July, in very murky circumstances, an officer found Goodwin and shot him dead.

The police claimed that Goodwin had been killed in self-defence, but the Canadian working class was utterly unconvinced.

On 2 August 1918, the day of Ginger Goodwin’s funeral, the Canadian labour movement – his comrades in life and now in death – called a general strike throughout Vancouver to protest police brutality against workers.

It was the first general strike in Canadian history, soon to be followed by the even larger Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.

Canadian radical politics had now clearly turned a corner, from the political demands for autonomy and independence by the likes of Mackenzie and Papineau in the nineteenth century, to the new demand for social liberation by the entire Canadian working class.

This wouldn’t have happened as it did without the struggle and sacrifice of Ginger Goodwin.

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Executed on this day in 1822, Denmark Vesey organised a mass slave rebellion in South Carolina

In the 1820s, a spectre was haunting white supremacy – the spectre of the Haitian Revolution.

Slaveowners in the U.S. South were terrified that the victorious struggle for black liberation in nearby Haiti might be repeated by enslaved black labourers in mainland North America.

These exploiters knew there was the potential for such a revolution built into the slave system they lived off.

Human beings have never accepted such degradation and abuse without resistance. Southern slaveowners were right to be afraid.

The French Revolution of 1789 promised freedom and equality for all - and two years later, the slave rebels in French Haiti took their freedom by force

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As the Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James wrote of the Haitian struggle:

When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity. The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression.

In early-nineteenth-century South Carolina, the popular hopes and elite fears about black liberation came to a head around the figure of Denmark Vesey.

Vesey was born ‘Telemaque’ in the Danish colony of St. Thomas.

He was enslaved by a sea captain, Joseph Vesey, and used as an assistant.

This experience meant that Telemaque became very familiar with the wider Caribbean world in the age of the Haitian Revolution.

Telemaque also learned multiple languages – French, Spanish, English – which would help with organising linguistically diverse groups of enslaved workers in the future.

After the end of the Revolutionary War in North America, Joseph Vesey retired to Charleston.

Then, on 9 November 1799, Telemaque won $1,500 in a city lottery, and he used $600 of this to purchase his legal freedom.

Like Denmark Vesey, John Brown was tried and executed by pro-slavery southerners for his role in organising a slave rebellion

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Emancipated, Telemaque now took the name ‘Denmark Vesey’ and began work as an independent carpenter.

But Vesey wasn’t willing or able to leave the question of black slavery behind him.

His first wife, Beck, was still enslaved. As a result, Denmark and Beck’s children were enslaved, too. And the people who were enslaving them refused to allow Denmark to buy his family’s freedom.

Denmark also continued to spend much of his social life with enslaved black men and women in Charleston, especially in Church.

In 1818, Vesey helped to co-found a congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston.

The new religious space was meant to give enslaved African and African-American spiritual support without the stifling, racist restrictions put on black members by the white-led Presbyterian Church.

Soon, Vesey’s Charleston branch of the AME was the largest in the U.S., with over 1,800 members.

The Church was also a useful setting in which to organise resistance to slavery.

The Thirteenth Amendment which abolished slavery was passed in January 1865, 43 years after Denmark Vesey was executed

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Christian theology provided some powerful passages for use in anti-slavery agitation, and the social space for black political organising in the AME was precious.

Although much of the historical evidence has been corrupted or skewed by vengeful white planters, it seems that, in 1822, Denmark Vesey planned to arm thousands of black slaves in South Carolina, rise up against the slaveowners, and escape to freedom in Haiti.

The date chosen for the uprising was 14 July - Bastille Day.

But a couple of defectors leaked the plan to the white ruling class in May – a white ruling class primed by the social revolution in Haiti to fear any hint of slave rebellion.

The white elite of Charleston quickly mobilised a racist white militia and set to hunting down the black conspirators.

Hundreds were arrested and imprisoned in the city workhouse, and the white planters also exploited the moment to destroy the AME Church in Charleston.

A farcical ‘court’ was created to prosecute Vesey, which accepted evidence against men who had not yet even been charged, and testimony which had been extracted by violence and the threat of violence.

Vesey and five enslaved black men were quickly sentenced to death and executed by hanging on 2 July 1822.

In the weeks that followed, 131 more black men were arrested in and around Charleston. 35 of them would be hanged and 31 deported from the U.S.

Denmark Vesey’s attempt at rebellion had failed, and the white terror which followed was a major blow for black political activity in South Carolina.

But it was only a temporary victory for the planters.

The rest of the nineteenth century was full of acts and campaigns of anti-slavery rebellion in the U.S., culminating in the massive slave uprisings which helped the Union win the Civil War.

In fact, Denmark and Beck Vesey’s sons, Randolph and Robert, lived to see and benefit from the Emancipation Proclamation, and Robert took part in the Union victory celebrations in 1865.

Denmark Vesey may have been defeated in 1822, but his family, his people, and his political cause prevailed in the end.

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Born on 29th May in 1918, Bert Corona was a leading twentieth-century activist and labor organiser

The Mexican American labor movement during the twentieth century was bigger than just Cesar Chavez, formidable as he was.

Laborers from the Mexican and Latin American migrant diaspora in the U.S., and their descendants born inside the country’s borders, have formed an integral part of the modern American working class.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that countless skilled organizers and leaders have emerged from this background.

Leader of the 1960s Delano Grape Strike, Cesar Chavez was one of the leading labor activists of the twentieth century

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Besides Chavez, another key Mexican American labor leader during the twentieth century was Humberto ‘Bert’ Noé Corona, born today in 1918, in El Paso, Texas.

Bert was part of a family shaped by the radical political traditions of modern México.

His dad fought in the Mexican Revolution during the 1910s, and was secretly organizing for the revolutionary movement in México from just across the border.

The Corona family briefly moved to México in 1922, until returning to El Paso, where Bert continued his education in Texas and New Mexico.

It was at school that Bert first encountered anti-Mexican racism in the U.S.

His mom, a schoolteacher from Chihuahua province, removed Bert from his first school because of the racial discrimination he faced there.

The same happened at his new school in Albuquerque. But this time, Bert took the lead in organizing his Mexican American classmates to fight for their dignity.

He led a student strike protesting the biased and triumphalist depictions of key events in U.S.-Mexican history, such as the brutal U.S. invasion of México in 1846, and the school backed down.

The Great Depression, so movingly depicted in Steinbeck's famous novel, had an especially brutal impact on Mexican workers

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A talented student and athlete, Bert won a basketball scholarship to attend the University of Southern California (USC) in 1936.

Amid the popular left-wing ferment of the New Deal years, however, Bert quickly became more interested in labor organizing.

He observed the especially violent impact of the Great Depression on Mexican workers in the U.S., including those ‘repatriados’ who were deported the instant their presence became inconvenient to the very same U.S. bosses who’d happily exploited their labor throughout the 1920s.

Bert agitated for better housing for working-class Mexican Americans in the barrios of Los Angeles, and in 1937 he began taking part in labor union activities with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

Bert Corona’s struggle for working-class liberation during these years – and throughout his life – was entangled with his struggle against racial discrimination. How could it not be, when the American working class has always been profoundly multiracial and often migrant-based?

As part of the CIO during the 1940s, Bert allied with the Spanish-Speaking People’s Congress of Luisa Moreno (1907-1992), a Latinx labor and cultural organization which refused to distinguish between the rights and dignity of migrant and native-born Latin American workers in the U.S.

In 1941, Corona then took a break from labor organizing during World War II, desperate to join the global struggle against fascism. 

He served in various branches of the U.S. armed forces, although his efforts to get sent overseas to the battlefronts were routinely obstructed by right-wing officers opposed to his background in progressive politics.

By the end of his long life of activism, Bert Corona became known as "El Viejo", the "Old Man" of Mexican American activism

After the war, and despite the growth of McCarthyism during the 1950s, Bert resumed his organizing work.

It was during these years that he began to work with Cesar Chavez, initially as part of the Community Service Organization (CSO) in California.

Bert joined the Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA), backed by the more left-wing U.S. labor unions.

In 1951, he went to México City as the ANMA delegate to an international conference of mineworkers. There, he befriended key figures on the Mexican left, including Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

Back home, in 1960, Corona co-founded the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), intended to force the Democratic Party to be more responsive to the interests of the Latinx working class.

Bert also worked with the Hermandad Mexicana Nacional (HMN) organization, fighting for the political and social rights of migrant labor from Latin America.

On the intellectual front, Bert soon became a key figure in the emerging field of Chicano Studies at U.S. universities during the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to write Latinx stories, agency, and contributions back into the history of the U.S., where they’d so often been erased.

Towards the end of his life, he became known as El Viejo - "The Old Man," a moniker that paid tribute to his long life of activism.

From childhood, Bert Corona bore witness to the intersections between class exploitation and racial oppression in U.S. society.

His life of activism – economic, political, and intellectual – was a model of how to resist in the name of a freer and more equal future.

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On this day in 1970, the National Guard opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam War

The U.S. government was wrong to think that its war in Vietnam wouldn’t cause trouble at home.

As American troop numbers in Southeast Asia were radically increased by Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, a powerful anti-war movement began to develop inside the United States.

The government, as always, did all it could to silence activists and shut down protests.

Like all movements for freedom and justice, the fight for peace in Vietnam wasn’t going to be an easy one.

In 1969, eight anti-war activists were put on trial for conspiring to incite riots that took place at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago

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After the draft was introduced in 1964, the threat of conscription turned thousands of ordinary Americans against the war.

And when it became obvious that it was mostly black and working-class men being sent to die for the sake of U.S. global supremacy, objections to the war became stronger.

The black freedom struggle in the U.S., including activists like Muhammad Ali, was a key source of peace activism. In 1968, shortly before his assassination, Martin Luther King came out publicly against the war.

On university campuses in the U.S. too there was massive opposition to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam.

The resources of critical thinking nurtured by higher education empowered students to identify and denounce the imperialist nature of the U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia.

There was widespread solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle for independence which, after enduring and defeating first the French empire, then Japan, then France again, was now facing down the United States.

 In 1966, Ali refused to be drafted into the military owing to his opposition to the Vietnam War, and was found guilty of draft evasion and stripped of his boxing titles

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By 1970, the anti-war movement had become a powerful force in U.S. society.

It was in April of that year that Richard Nixon, who had been elected President in 1968 on the promise to end the war in Vietnam, announced that he had in fact illegally expanded the conflict by invading the neutral state of Cambodia.

This was the immediate backdrop for the Kent State University Massacre of 4 May 1970, when four unarmed students were shot dead on their own campus by the Ohio National Guard for being present at a peaceful demonstration against the Vietnam War.

In response to Nixon’s confession that his government had invaded Cambodia, a protest of 500 Kent State students was immediately held on the University Commons.

Another protest against the new war in Cambodia was planned for three days later, on 4 May.

During the next few nights, tensions in Kent quickly increased.

Anti-war protestors, both belonging to the University and independent of it, clashed with violent police.

Police were now routinely invading the Kent State campus, and on 2 May the Mayor of Kent easily convinced the belligerent Governor of Ohio, Jim Rhodes, to deploy the National Guard.

The conservative forces of ‘law and order’ (which often meant, in practice, unconstitutional violence) began slandering peaceful anti-war protestors at Kent State as “un-American” dissidents, echoing the reactionary rhetoric of the Nixon administration in Washington.

Many of history's most significant protest movements have been student-run - like the White Rose Movement at the University of Munich

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These tensions boiled over on Monday, 4 May, 1970.

When 1,000 peaceful anti-war demonstrators gathered on the Kent State Commons, the National Guard ordered them to disperse immediately.

The students refused, standing by their democratic right to free speech. The Guardsmen then advanced on them, firing teargas.

But the soldiers weren’t only armed with teargas. Moments later, a group of them opened fire with live rounds.

Four students – Allison Krause (19), William Knox Schroeder (19), Jeffrey Glenn Miller (20), and Sandra Lee Scheuer (20) – were shot dead.

Eight others were wounded, with one of them paralysed.

The Kent State Massacre, for which the Nixon government was shamelessly unapologetic, was an act of barbarity and political repression more suited to a police state, not a democracy.

The massacre triggered a huge wave of solidarity strikes by students across the United States, covering 450 university campuses.

Students at New York University declared “They Can’t Kill Us All.”

And they were right.

The anti-war movement in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s was key to ending the brutal American invasion of Vietnam.

But whereas the movement itself was peaceful, its opponents were not.

Many anti-war activists, including MLK and the students at Kent State, were made to pay with their lives for supporting peace. Their legacies live on.

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Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón denounced the Díaz dictatorship and fought for revolution

We are free, truly free, when we don’t need to rent our arms to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths.

- Ricardo Flores Magón

The Mexican Revolution of 1910, one of the most important in world history, had no single unifying ideology.

When the decades-old dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz was overthrown, there were several conflicting visions for how México should be remade.

Moderate liberals wanted constitutional government and greater legal protection for private property; Emiliano Zapata and his peasant rebels fought for land redistribution; and the Mexican labour movement dreamt of socialism.

In amongst all of this were the Flores Magón brothers: the founders of Mexican anarchism.

No history of anarchism would be complete without the Magón brothers and their struggle against the Díaz dictatorship in México

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Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón were from Oaxaca, in southern México.

They were born into an already-radical family. Margarita and Teodoro, their parents, had met in 1863 while fighting in Benito Juárez’s radical liberal army, which was struggling for Mexican independence against a French imperial occupation of the country.

And Enrique and Ricardo were soon involved in progressive politics, too.

Ricardo, born in 1874, and Enrique, born in 1877, moved to Mexico City while they were children.

Both brothers became students in the city, and they were soon protesters as well.

Juárez had been replaced as President by Porfirio Díaz, who usurped dictatorial powers and ruled México for decades.

Díaz was unpopular. His power rested on the army and the rich.

No one who wanted a democratic México, worthy of the country's revolutionary traditions, was content under Díaz.

The Magón Brothers

The Magón brothers were active in student protests against the dictatorship during the late nineteenth century.

But the liberalism of their parents’ generation was no longer enough for the Magón duo.

Traditional Mexican liberalism wasn’t the revolutionary force it used to be. For younger radicals in turn-of-the-century México, the old liberalism was too close to capitalism to provide a theory for social revolution which the country needed.

Impoverished Mexican peasants needed land redistribution, not the free market, in order to create the material foundations for their dignity. And the growing industrial working class in México wanted collective bargaining rights for its labour unions, and state-guaranteed social welfare.

The Magón brothers increasingly understood this social crisis. They were familiar with México’s largely indigenous, rural majority – they were half-Nahua indigenous themselves, after all.

So, the brothers moved beyond liberalism to embrace a socialist form of anarchism, which had a large following in Latin America.

Still operating under the umbrella of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), they became radical journalists, denouncing the Díaz regime and calling for a revolution in México.

The Magóns spent plenty of time in Mexican jails during the early 1900s, where they read up on the contemporary theoreticians of left-wing global anarchism, such as Peter Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

But in late 1903, government repression made it impossible for the brothers to continue publishing in Porfirio Díaz’s México, so they crossed the border into exile in Texas.

Che Guevara might be Latin America's most famous revolutionary, but the Magón brothers were a pretty iconic duo

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Living in the U.S. didn’t stop the Magón brothers from playing a leading role in Mexican radicalism. The two men became part of a thriving, transnational subculture of progressive politics which criss-crossed the U.S. borderlands.

In the runup to the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the spectre of anarchist Magonismo haunted the Díaz regime from afar.

In St. Louis, Missouri, Enrique Magón co-wrote a new radical program for the PLM, calling for social revolution in México and the overthrow of the dictatorship.

The two brothers travelled across the U.S., helping to inspire PLM uprisings inside México during the 1900s, which eventually triggered the Revolution which overthrew Díaz.

The Magóns travelled between México and the U.S. during the 1910s. They weren’t safe from imprisonment in either country, as Mexican counter-revolutionaries and their allies in the United States tried to hunt them down.

In 1918, amid the violent crackdown on left-wing activism in the U.S. during the First World War, Enrique and Ricardo were imprisoned in Kansas for protesting against the war as an imperialist bloodbath.

Ricardo died in mysterious circumstances in U.S. custody in 1922. But Enrique was luckier, and returned to México in 1923, where he continued to organise in the revolutionary peasant movement there during the 1920s and 1930s.

México has one of the richest radical traditions in the world, and the Flores Magón brothers – to this day – are among its most famous members.

No history of modern anarchism or social revolution would be complete without them.

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