Cool USA Facts!

In 1934, in the midst of the worsening conditions of the great depression, 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states, went on strike for 22 days. Deputies and armed strikebreakers in South Carolina fired on pickets, killing seven, wounding twenty others. State authorities aided by the national guard suppressed the strikes, killing and arresting dozens of picketers and strikers across the nation. Governor Blackwood of South Carolina called out the National Guard with orders to shoot to kill any picketers who tried to enter the mills. Other governors soon followed suit. Nate Shaw, a black alabama sharecropper on strike, was shot and arrested in late 1932, and served twelve years in an Alabama prison.1