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Remembering a forgotten event in labor history

Pennsylvania's Lattimer Massacre

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On a late December day in 1964 I visited Granny at the Hazleton State Hospital, an old brick building in Pennsylvania once known as the Miners’ Hospital. She was on the first floor in a big open space. Large windows and screens, wheelchairs and rows of beds suggested a hospital ward from the 1920s. Now 78 years old, she still had some years left but was starting to spend more time here. 

Framed by gray hair pulled into a bun, her face was taut and stern, as always. Light eyes that had seen a lot of trouble peered through wire rim glasses. Granny never talked much. But she had something to say now. 

Very deliberately she told me how her father, John Slebodnick, was shot in the back of the head by sheriff’s deputies. He was marching with striking miners to a place called Lattimer. Large culm banks were all around. On a dusty road he was shot near a ditch by a trolley line. She said her father survived but lived for many years with a bullet in his head, which pained him greatly when the weather turned bad.

Her story seemed like a dream. I was not sure what she was talking about, not sure if it happened in the United States, not even sure if it happened at all. I never heard of such an event. It was not mentioned by my family and was not part of any stories about Hazleton or the surrounding coal towns. 

In a vague way I knew Granny came from a family of Slovak coal miners and that she married a miner, who died from black lung in the 1930s. There wasn’t much more. 

Hazleton still had a rough landscape of coal dominated by strippings, culm banks and abandoned breakers, but in 1964 mining seemed like something from another time, a bygone era. I was young and didn’t know what to make of her story. So I put it in the back of my mind and said goodbye.

Time went by. I moved to New York City to go to school and, in 1971, Granny passed. Sometime in the late 1970s, on a cold rainy night, I stepped into a bookstore on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. In the back of the store was a wooden bin filled with a large number of books in no particular order. These were the remainders, unread stories now piled in a corner. 

I looked down into the pile and saw a red, black and yellow book with a coal miner on the cover. “The Guns of Lattimer” it read, by Michael Novack. I hurriedly paged through the book, but was stopped cold on page 130. There was John Slebodnick, shot in the back of the head by a deputy’s bullet from a Winchester rifle. Stunned, I now saw Granny’s nightmare unfold on the pages of an unknown history book.

<p>John Slebodnick</p>
John Slebodnick

A tragic and violent event opened before me. John’s brother, Andrew, was also shot, three times in the back, but he managed to survive. On a bloody September afternoon, alongside John and Andrew, 19 miners were killed and 40 more wounded at Lattimer, a small coal town in the mountains of Pennsylvania. The shooting, one of the largest acts of labor violence in American history, attracted national and international newspaper coverage for weeks.

A handful of very rich mine owners, known as Coal Barons, provided brand new Winchester repeating rifles to a posse of sheriff’s deputies. With these guns they shot down unarmed striking miners, mostly immigrant Slovaks. After a long trial, neither the sheriff nor any of his deputies were held accountable for these deaths. The shooting then disappeared so quickly into the mists of American amnesia that within a single generation it was almost completely forgotten. But it did have a name. It was called the Lattimer Massacre.

I still have that book, now with a broken spine held together by clear tape, its pages heavily underlined and marked up in blue ink. And there on page 130 is a circle around a man named John Slebodnick. A man nobody knows, but who was shot in an obscure mining town fighting for a decent way of life and the rights of labor under an American flag in 1897.

Mike Scarcella is a retired NYC teacher and labor researcher, and former union activist and chapter leader with the United Federation of Teachers.

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  • joeginis

    Thank you for sharing your powerful story, brother.

    Thursday, January 23 Report this