Red Pittsburgh - Left and labor history in Western Pennsylvania

Soldiers for Spain, buried in Pittsburgh

Post author By Red Pittsburgh
Post date May 23, 2022

When fascist troops threatened Madrid in fall 1936, thousands of foreigners — mostly Communists, but also anarchists, organizers and adventurers of all stripes — rallied to save the Spanish Republic. “The men who paid for it with their blood did so without bitterness,” Robert Colodny wrote two decades later. “And the price paid was another down payment. . . . And others would come to pay it.”

Colodny himself would be among the later arrivals, as a soldier of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of U.S. volunteers. He would be wounded, would return home and pursue an academic career at the University of Pittsburgh. Colodny one of at least nine Spanish war veterans buried in western Pennsylvania.

This year, for Memorial Day, Red Pittsburgh has compiled a list of biographies and a map of their resting places for anyone interested in paying respects (or even leaving a flag). Click on a marker to find details, and read on to learn their stories.

Local left history

A strike at “Bolshevists”: The Woodlawn sedition case

Post author By Red Pittsburgh
Post date May 9, 2022

When police raided a gathering of Woodlawn Communists on Armistice Day, 1926, they kicked off a five-year legal battle that would draw national attention and end with one organizer dead.

Police in Woodlawn, Beaver County — later part of Aliquippa, and home to many Jones & Laughlin Steel workers — carried out the nighttime raids on Nov. 11, the eighth anniversary of World War I’s end. Initial reports from the American Civil Liberties Union suggested a dozen workers were snatched from three homes, one of which was host to a birthday party.

Labor struggle

“Dignity of labor”: One big union for Black women

Post author By Red Pittsburgh
Post date January 18, 2022

In August 1918, as U.S. troops fought in the trenches of France, the ladies of a North Side Red Cross auxiliary club came to shocking realization.

An NWILU button featuring its founder, as depicted on the Hake’s auction site.

“One of the workers remarked that she now has to pay her laundress $3 a day,” the Pittsburgh Post recounted. “Another one exclaimed that so did she, and wasn’t it awful the way things are going. Then a regular chorus broke out . . . each had received a telephone call from her laundress which was an announcement of new terms,” including higher pay and streetcar fare.

How had low-paid washerwomen across the city simultaneously decided to charge the same rate — a 50-percent increase for many? The answer lay in the Negro Women’s Industrial Labor Union, a unique and seemingly short-lived organization that fought for Black domestic workers’ rights in Pittsburgh.

Lives on the left

The “working girl” who led Pittsburgh’s dissident communists

Post author By Red Pittsburgh
Post date December 9, 2021

From party literature and press clippings, it seems as though Eloise Booth was singlehandedly running the Socialist Workers Party’s entire Pittsburgh operation.

The Trotskyist militant — a waitress who worked on union campaigns, reported for the party press and organized events from a Fifth Avenue office — spent several years in Pittsburgh before her sudden death in 1952. A key figure in the SWP but little-remembered outside the party, she seemed to be the sort of jack-of-all-trades activist who keep small radical groups afloat.

It was an important job for a party that believed a new American revolution was “the realistic program of our epoch.”

Local left history

A lost center for Jewish culture

Post author By Red Pittsburgh
Post date October 4, 2021

The stone building at 6328 Forbes Ave. has borne several names in its history: the Baal Shem Tov Shul, the Labor Zionist Educational Center. In the 1940s and ’50s — before crusading right-wing activists and politicians shut it down by government edict — it was the Jewish Cultural Center.

Sitting in the heart of the modern-day Squirrel Hill Jewish community, the center was a refuge for left-wing Jews during the Communist movement’s heyday. Just nine years into its existence, however, the center came under attack, with anticommunists claiming it was the site of Soviet indoctrination and guerrilla warfare training. Two years later it was nearly gone, and before long it would be all but forgotten.