| On July 20, I was called to go to a warehouse because a
bunch of cops were going to move a truck. About a thousand policemen were there. Around
ten o'clock the captain came up to me and said, "Look, we don't want a mess
here." I said all you have to do is move your cops away and don't move any trucks. He
checked with his superior and came back: "It's a deal." It was a phony deal. At
12:30 the police went back to the warehouse. We went back, too, thousands of pickets, all
unarmed. The police surrounded the truck and started moving it. Nine or ten or us in an
open-bodied truck moved in front of it to stop them. So help me, police on roofs started
shooting from all directions right into the workers. About fifty were injured. I was one
of them, pretty near lost my leg. Two strikers got killed. The governor's investigating
committee put it this way: "Police took direct aim at the pickets and fired to
kill" and "at no time did pickets attack the police." Governor Olsen had a
perfect right to arrest them for murder. Instead he declared a state of martial law and
called out the National Guard. They surrounded the union headquarters and put most of our
leadership in the stockade. |
