The Big Strike: A Journalist Describes the 1934 San Francisco Strike
by Mike Quin
On May 9, 1934, International Labor Association (ILA) leaders called a strike of all dockworkers on the West Coast who were joined a few days later by seamen and teamsters, effectively stopping all shipping from San Diego to Seattle. San Francisco would become the scene of the strike’s most dramatic and widely known incidents, aptly described in one headline as “War in San Francisco!†On Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, two strikers were killed by the San Francisco police. A mass funeral march of tens of thousands of strikers and sympathizers four days later and the general strike that followed effectively shut down both San Francisco and Oakland (across the bay). Mike Quin, a self-described “rank-and-file journalist,†offered a sympathetic picture of the striking workers actions in The Big Strike, a collection of his published articles. Here, Quin described the events leading up to Bloody Thursday, and what happened in its aftermath.
more here:
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/124/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934_West_Coast_Longshore_Strike
