12 “Use My Broken Heart”: Making Change Out of Tragedy

April 8, 2014

On Friday, July 26, 2013, Sybrina Fulton rose to speak to assembled African American advocates at the National Urban League meeting in Philadelphia. It had been a bit over seventeen months since February 26, 2012, when her seventeen-year-old son, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida, walking home from a convenience store, carrying a bag of Skittles and an iced tea. It took forty-four days and considerable public outcry before neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder in her son’s death, though Zimmerman admitted killing the boy after calling 911. The call recorded: “Hey, we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood and there’s a real suspicious guy.” “This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something.” “These [expletive], they always get away.” Then, against police orders, Zimmerman left his car to pursue the youth. He claimed that he shot Trayvon Martin only after the teen punched him repeatedly, and the Sanford police said that Florida’s 2005 Stand Your Ground defense law allowed the use of deadly force if a person fears death or bodily harm, as Zimmerman claimed he did. Only mounting public outrage led to Zimmerman’s finally being charged with second-degree murder on April 11.¹

These events fed a spirited public conversation about racial profiling and gun control in America. Still, race remained at most an unspoken subtext in Zimmerman’s trial. Sybrina Fulton addressed the Urban League just thirteen days after a Sanford jury acquitted George Zimmerman of manslaughter and second-degree murder in her son’s death.² With the almost unbearable grace that has characterized her public persona, Fulton sought words to transform the unendurable. “My message to you,” she told the assembled activists, “is, please use my story, please use my tragedy, please use my broken heart to say to yourself, ‘We cannot let this happen to anybody else’s child’.”³

Other children clearly remain at risk. In another highly reported case, on November 23, 2012, Michael Dunn shot and killed another seventeen-year-old unarmed African American high school student, Jordan Davis, in a Jacksonville, Florida, gas station parking lot after Davis and three friends refused to turn down the music in their car that Dunn considered “thug music” and “rap crap.” Dunn grabbed a gun from his own car and fired into the teens’ vehicle because, he said, he felt threatened and thought the unarmed Davis had a gun. On February 15, 2014, Dunn was convicted on three charges of attempted murder for shooting at the three surviving teens but was acquitted of killing Davis under the Stand Your Ground defense because he said he felt threatened.⁴

Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis represent countless equally wrenching stories. Their deaths have generated a wide range of responses to the appalling numbers of children lost to gun violence in the United States, and heated debates about the so-called “stand your ground” laws that many, including the parents of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, consider at least partly responsible for their deaths. According to the Children’s Defense Fund in 2012, gun violence was eclipsed only by car accidents as the leading cause of death among all American children ages nineteen and younger. In all, 2,694 children died of gun shots in the United States in 2010. Two-thirds of those deaths were homicides. American children were seventeen times more likely to be killed by guns than their peers in other high-income countries.⁵

Appalling as these figures are, the situation is far worse for children of color. In 2010, White children were nearly three times more likely to die in a car accident than from firearms, but gun violence was the leading cause of death for African American children and adolescents. “Black children and teens were twice as likely to be killed by a gun” than in a car accident in 2010.⁶

These figures are sobering, the losses they represent horrific. Still, I might, as a historian, have spared you this topic were it not for connections to other children’s deaths that tugged and troubled me as I witnessed the determined grace of four bereft parents seeking through social activism some redemptive justice for their slain children. Jordan Davis’s mother, Lucia McBath, became a national spokesperson for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.⁷ Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin founded the non-profit Trayvon Martin Foundation in March 2012 “to create awareness of how violent crime impacts the families of the victims and to provide support and advocacy for those families in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin.” The Foundation’s mission includes increasing public awareness of all forms of racial, ethnic and gender profiling, and “educat[ing] youth on conflict resolution techniques,” to “reduce the incidences where confrontations between strangers turn deadly.”⁸

The desire of grieving parents to change laws and combat prejudices that contributed to their children’s deaths is understandable; it is laudable; it evokes empathy. For me these events also evoked unsettling histories of children lost in two labor struggles over a century ago, and of other children whose deaths have fueled more recent battles for racial equity. My 2014 lecture developed as I wrestled with what might link the legacies of these lost young lives besides the fact that these children occupied the tangled terrains of my memory.

“[P]lease use my broken heart to say to yourself, ‘We cannot let this happen to anybody else’s child’.” Sybrina Fulton’s words evoked those of another mother, Mary Petrucci, whom I introduced in my 2009 lecture. Mary Petrucci lost her children on April 20, 1914, in the brutal climax of a strike, an event known as the Ludlow Massacre. The Petruccis joined 9,000 coal miners who went on strike on September 23, 1913 against three southern Colorado coal companies, the largest of which, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) was controlled by the Rockefellers.⁹ The miners averaged $1.68 a day, paid in company scrip; their death rate was double to triple the national average.¹⁰ They struck for recognition of their union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), an eight-hour day, and a 10 percent increase in tonnage rates. They wanted pay for all so-called dead work, like timbering; a check-weighman elected by the miners to ensure fair weights for their coal; the right to trade in any store, to live where they pleased and to choose their own doctor, rather than submit to the social and economic control of their company towns. They sought enforcement of Colorado mining laws and an end to the company guard system. Four of their demands were Colorado state law, won in past struggles.¹¹

Knowing that their striking members would be evicted from their company housing, the UMWA leased land and erected eight tent colonies to house the miners and their families.¹² The Petruccis lived in the largest tent colony, near the Ludlow, Colorado train depot.

As in other Colorado miners’ strikes, the coal operators asked for state troops, and on October 28, Democratic Governor Elias Ammons sent the Colorado National Guard. As the strike wore on, company guards and hired guns were mustered in as soldiers.¹³ On April 20, 1914 some of them shot and killed UMWA organizer Louis Tikas and two other strikers. Then they poured machine gun fire into the Ludlow tent colony, killing two more union men and eleven-year-old Frank Snyder. The miners fought back with rifles they had hidden in case of attack. Some of the women and children ran for shelter in nearby arroyos; some hid in a well; some huddled in underground pits the strikers had dug under the tents in case of violence.¹⁴

The morning of April 20, Mary Petrucci was doing the laundry when her tent in the southeast corner, front row, was set on fire. She ran with her three children to a neighboring tent and got them safely inside the pit beneath its floor. When she regained consciousness, she was holding her dead infant, surrounded by the corpses of her friends, their children, and her own. The dead included two women and eleven children—Patricia Valdez and her four children, the pregnant Cedilano Costa and her two children, the three Petrucci children, and Cloriva and Rodgerlo Pedregon, ages four and six.¹⁵

Like Sybrina Fulton and Lucia McBath, Mary Petrucci went public, joining three other women survivors who traveled to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York to tell the story of Ludlow and the union cause. Just weeks after losing her children, Mary Petrucci told a reporter:

I used to sing around my work and playing with my babies. . . . I’m 24 years old and I suppose I’ll live a long time, but I don’t see how I can ever be happy again. . . .But you’re not to think we could do it any differently another time. We are working people—my husband and I—and we’re stronger for the union than before the strike. . . .I can’t have my babies back. But perhaps when everybody knows about them, something will be done to make the world a better place for all babies.¹⁶

Mary Petrucci might have spoken as well for other parents who had lost their children just four months before, when an event known as the Italian Hall Disaster climaxed a strike of copper miners in Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. The Michigan strike involved copper miners, not coal, and a different union—the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) which focused on hardrock metal miners, while the UMWA organized coal miners. By summer 1913 the WFM had enough members in Michigan copper mines to make seemingly modest requests of their employers, the largest of which was the Calumet and Hecla mining company. On April 23, 1913, they asked the Mass Mines company for a full dinner hour without having to sort “drills, tools, etc. at dinner hour as we have to do at present,” and to “kindly issue orders to the hoisting engineers not to run the hoist so fast while the men are riding on the skip.” The company responded by firing all union men.¹⁷

In early June, mass union meetings drew up to 3000 miners. Management hired spies to infiltrate the unions and braced for a strike. The strike came on July 23, 1913, when members of the Western Federation of Miners struck for a $3 day, better working conditions, and the elimination of the new one-man drill that cut jobs and left miners working alone underground without a partner in case of accidents. Most of all they struck for what no employer would grant: recognition of the WFM as the miners’ representative and acceptance of collective bargaining.¹⁸

As at Ludlow and as had been common practice in miners’ strikes for half a century, the companies hired private detectives to infiltrate the unions, local businessmen organized an anti-union Citizens’ Alliance, and the mine owners got Michigan Governor Woodbridge Ferris to send the National Guard to keep order, sparking confrontations between the strikers and soldiers.¹⁹ The use of state troops and of detectives hired to break unions, and the contexts of employer paternalism and social control characterized both strikes.

In both, too, largely Anglo-American owners faced well-organized multi-ethnic workers. The striking coal miners identified with at least twenty-seven ethnicities and spoke as many languages. Italians formed the largest group, followed by Latinxs (16 percent), who coal operators considered “foreigners,” though their ancestors had settled Santa Fe in 1598. The rest, in order, were eastern Europeans (15 percent), Anglo-Americans (13 percent), Austrians (including Serbs and Slavs) (11 percent), African Americans (7 percent), Greeks (6 percent), and a few Japanese, Germans, Scandinavians, Scotch, Irish, English, French, Spanish, and Canadians.²⁰ The striking copper miners included large numbers of Finns, Croatians, Slovenians, Italians, Russians, and Poles, as well as Cornish, Irish, and Americans. In 1913–1914, many White Americans racialized some of these ethnic groups—Latinx, Serbs, Slavs, Italians, Greeks, and even Finns—and considered them people of color. The Calumet strikers maintained community spirit and solidarity with frequent parades.²¹ As in the coal miners’ tent colonies, women played central roles—they paraded, picketed, taunted strikebreakers, and, in Michigan, formed broom brigades, dipping their brooms in outhouses before using them to poke strikebreakers.²²

Both strikes were violent at times. Union men beat strikebreakers. In Colorado, CF&I detectives shot into the Forbes tent colony, killing one miner, shooting a young girl in the face, and riddling a boy’s legs with machine gun bullets. Two detectives who worked for the coal operators shot and killed UMWA organizer Gerald Lippiati on August 16, 1913, before the strike began.²³ The next day, August 17, in Michigan, the miners buried two strikers, Steve Putrich and Alois Tijan, slain in their boardinghouse in Seeberville by four operatives of the Waddell-Mahon Detective Agency acting as Sheriff’s Deputies, because two other men in the same boardinghouse had walked on company property.²⁴ Then on Labor Day, September 1, there was a clash between the sheriff’s deputies, strikers, and women picketers, in which the deputies yelled at the women that they should be at home cooking and the women called the deputies scabs. The deputies opened fire, and fourteen-year-old Margaret Fazekas was shot in the back of the head as she ran away. Margaret Fazekas survived, and later explained that the doctor who treated her “said some of my brain came out, but he put it back in again, and he took a bone out of it—a small bone.”²⁵

Prominent labor leaders came to support both strikes, among them the feisty octogenarian Mother Jones.²⁶ Anarchist Carlo Tresca, a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, spoke to the copper strikers at Calumet’s Italian Hall.²⁷ Built in 1908, Italian Hall was a three-story showpiece for the local Italian community. In the minds of employers and mine managers, it was associated with foreigners and radicals who they considered synonymous with the WFM.²⁸

Italian Hall boasted brick walls, a fireproof roof, iron fire escapes, and a 40x70 foot auditorium on the second floor, where, on Christmas Eve, 1913, the Calumet WFM Women’s Auxiliary held a Christmas party for strikers’ children.²⁹ Gifts poured in from outside to help brighten Christmas for striking families facing a Michigan winter. The Chicago Women’s Trade Union League sent “little wooly hoods, stout shoes, warm flannels and coats.”³⁰ Four-to-five hundred people crowded into the hall, mostly children eagerly awaiting Santa Claus and the promised oranges, candy, and other scarce treats. Eyewitness reports of what happened next differed, but most agreed that as the children moved toward the stage to receive gifts, a man entered the hall and yelled “Fire” several times. There was no fire—the Women’s Auxiliary had not used candles on the Christmas tree for fear that the children might get hurt—but in the ensuing panic, people crowded down the stairs to escape. Apparently, someone tripped toward the bottom of the stairs. Chaos ensued as bodies piled upon one another, filling the stairwell with crushed and suffocating humanity. In the ensuing days, lists of the dead appeared in union and ethnic newspapers. These lists, combined with the Houghton county coroner’s inquest, produce a frustratingly vague accounting of seventy-two dead listed in various papers to seventy-five bodies in the morgue. These imprecise figures may be incomplete, as some families took their dead home rather than to the morgue. Of the dead, at least fifty were children younger than thirteen; two were infants. Among the children were five groups of siblings: three Heikkenen brothers, three Klarich girls, three Mihelchich children, three or four Montanen children, and two Myllykangas boys. Twenty-nine mothers died with their children in the stairwell. Like the strikers overall, the dead represented many ethnicities, but Finns suffered the greatest toll, with forty-nine lost.³¹

The man who yelled “Fire” got away. Some witnesses insisted that he wore a badge of the anti-union Citizens’ Alliance. Others said they were prevented from rescuing some of the victims by members of the Citizens’ Alliance and Houghton County deputies who pushed them away, blocked the entrance to the hall, and kept them from untangling the bodies at the foot of the stairs.³²

The national president of the WFM, Charles Moyer, was in the district. He told his members that the union would provide for the dead and their families, and to reject offers of money from all but union members, a policy aimed at the Citizens’ Alliance, but that excluded and alienated other local citizens. Nonetheless, Moyer’s position could not justify what happened next. Two days after the tragedy, some thirty members of the Citizens’ Alliance led by Calumet and Hecla attorney Albert Petermann broke into Moyer’s hotel room in Hancock, beat Moyer, shot him, and forced him and a bodyguard on a train for Chicago.³³

Funerals for the victims were held December 28, 1913, at three Catholic Churches and the Finnish Apostolic and Finnish Synod Lutheran churches. Some 5,000 mourners paraded past an estimated 20,000 supporters in solemn procession to Lake View cemetery. The caskets of the adult victims were transported in horse-drawn carriages. Miners carried the children to their graves.³⁴

We still don’t know who yelled “Fire” in Italian Hall. A coroner’s jury quickly rejected charges that a Citizens’ Alliance member caused the panic. It also refused to allow translators for witnesses who could not testify in English, thus eliminating a number who claimed they could identify the culprit. No one was ever prosecuted for the tragedy, but on December 27 the editor and four staff of the Finnish Tyomies Publishing Company were arrested for printing detailed sworn statements that accused the Citizens’ Alliance and sheriff’s deputies of fostering the Italian Hall disaster.³⁵ Regardless of who yelled “Fire,” there would have been no Christmas party, and no inflamed tensions in Copper Country without the strike, and the aftermath would have been different without mine management’s considerable power over local officials and the local press.

One common thread in all these unhappy histories is the lack of legal justice for the victims. Neither of the self-confessed killers of Trayvon Martin or Jordan Davis was convicted for their murders. Both dead youths were in effect tried posthumously for behaving like teenagers.³⁶ No one was convicted for the carnage at Ludlow or for the Italian Hall tragedy. Six men were charged with murder in the Seeberville shootings; four were convicted of manslaughter; one accused detective fled to New York where he continued to work for Calumet and Hecla. But strikers were arrested in the Copper Strike by the hundreds for everything ranging from indecent language to assault with intent to murder. Eighty-eight were charged with intimidation, eighty with “rioting,” sixty-one with assault and battery, fifty-eight with carrying concealed weapons, thirty-six with assault with intent to murder. Key union organizers were arrested up to seven times.³⁷

Both strikes failed. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., realizing that he faced a public relations disaster, hired publicist Ivy Lee and William Lyon Mackenzie King as a labor consultant. King invented the company union as a solution for Rockefeller’s labor issues.³⁸ In Copper Country, Italian Hall sucked any remaining energy out of the strike. Union organizers left or were forced out, and the WFM, which had spent over $800,000 on the strike, called it off after the members voted to end their struggle on April 13, 1914, just a week before the Ludlow Massacre.³⁹

As the strikes ended in defeat and the courts failed the victims, the unions and bereaved parents turned to the court of public opinion. The WFM hired a film company to record the Italian Hall victims’ funeral on December 28 and distributed it nationally.⁴⁰ The UMWA reached sympathizers through the four women’s speaking tour. Author Upton Sinclair led a picket of the Rockefeller offices in New York and ultimately wrote two novels about Ludlow.⁴¹ Scholars of organized labor and American progressive reform have squeezed some indirect victories from Ludlow and Italian Hall. Many Keweenaw copper mines adopted an eight-hour day, and the two strikes may have influenced national legislation to limit the hours of labor and ban child labor.⁴² Italian Hall may have informed Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1919 Supreme Court Decision in Schenck v. United States that limited the First Amendment’s protection of free speech to exclude dangerous speech like “falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” Certainly, employers learned that it was very bad press to kill children, so found other methods to obstruct organized labor. These mines remained unorganized until the 1930s; the company union was ruled illegal in 1935.

Could such gradual gains satisfy Mary Petrucci and her hope that “something [might] be done to make the world a better place for all babies”? It was those words that I heard echoed in Sybrina Fulton’s plea: “Use my broken heart to say to yourself, ‘We cannot let this happen to anybody else’s child’.” Because the world is not yet safe for all babies. Mary Petrucci’s deceptively simple hope, it seems to me, presents a two-part challenge. The first part is to hear and remember: “Perhaps when everyone knows about them.” The next part: “something will be done,” invokes the imperative to act.

Memory first. The UMWA was more successful than the WFM in seizing the terrain of memory, in part because it was able to own the literal terrain of struggle. In 1915 it bought the land the Ludlow tent colony had occupied and in 1918 dedicated a monument there to the union dead, where it has held an annual memorial commemoration ever since. The copper miners were not evicted from the company towns of the Keweenaw, but most union loyalists chose to leave or were forced out because the mines would rehire only those who renounced the union. Historian James Foster once quipped, “history is written by the literate and the sedentary.”⁴³ The forced mobility of union miners erased their story from much local lore—at least from versions that could be safely shared. Locals still debate who was responsible for the Italian Hall tragedy, but the Hall was torn down in 1984, too-raw a reminder of a painful past. Only the arch around the front door was saved as a small memorial, now a Michigan State Historic Site.⁴⁴

Both strikes entered cultural memory of sorts through two ballads that legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie recorded on his 1946 album Struggle: “Ludlow Massacre” and “1913 Massacre.” Guthrie got his inspiration from activist Ella Reeve Bloor’s autobiography, We Are Many,⁴⁵ ghostwritten when Bloor was in her late seventies. Bloor emerges as something like the Forrest Gump of the American Left, claiming first-hand knowledge of most major labor struggles, though she played minor roles if any at Ludlow and Italian Hall. Guthrie’s songs are not accurate in all details, but they kept the memories before historians cared.

These memories still inspire the union faithful. Historian Gary Kaunonen reported that he was:

 . . .giving walking tours of downtown Calumet in 2006, and one of the stops was of course the Italian Hall Memorial. I was there giving the talk and at the end one of the guys in the tour said, “Okay that makes sense now.” He went on to say that he was in the Michigan Corrections Officers union and just before they were taking a key vote the delegates from the Baraga and Marquette locals yelled from the back of the room, “remember Italian Hall.”

Almost 100 years later it had significance to those union members.⁴⁶

Collective memory is something else, and these histories have only recently begun to enter the mainstream. During the 2013–2014 strike centennials, the governments that once vilified union labor and the local communities once torn by these conflicts took a much more proactive role in preserving their troubled pasts. The National Park Service has created a Keweenaw National Historic Park, which in June 2013 hosted a commemoration of the 1913 Italian Hall tragedy at the memorial in Calumet.⁴⁷ Michigan Technological University got federal and state humanities funding for an exhibit about the Copper Strike that travelled through the Keweenaw for the centennial year. Houghton hosted “Retrospection & Respect: Michigan’s 1913–1914 Mining/Labor Strike Symposium.”⁴⁸

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper established the Ludlow Centennial Commemoration Commission, a historic truth and reconciliation commission of sorts that included representatives from Colorado universities, History Colorado, Colorado Humanities, the Colorado National Guard, and the United Mine Workers of America.⁴⁹ The Commission and local communities hosted commemorative activities from September 2013 to December 2014, including an exhibit, “Children of Ludlow: Life in a Battle Zone, 1913–1914,” at the Pueblo museum.⁵⁰ The UMWA hosted a Ludlow Centennial Remembrance Ceremony on May 18, 2014, at the Ludlow Massacre site.

The centennials drew me back to these chapters of my own work as well. The Ludlow Massacre site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2009, an effort spearheaded by a committee I chaired for the Labor and Working Class History Association that I discussed in my 2009 lecture (see chapter 8). I also consulted with the U.S. Park Service as it developed an interpretive plan for the Keweenaw National Historic Park Visitors Center in 2009–2010. As I sat glued to the George Zimmerman trial, I was consulting with filmmakers who produced a PBS documentary “Red Metal” about the Michigan Copper Strike. As I wrote my 2014 lecture, I consulted with other filmmakers working on a documentary about Ludlow and I prepared to speak at the 100^th Anniversary Commemorative Service at the Ludlow National Historic Landmark site. The personal and idiosyncratic ways that these events connect for me made me curious about their links, but cautious, too. I resisted this topic, but it wouldn’t let go as I struggled to trace those connections, and my compulsion to find some meaning there.

What links and separates these troubled tales? They all involve children who died tragically and whose losses inspired someone—a parent, a union, a movement—to use their memories for positive change. The circumstances of their deaths differed. The children at Ludlow and Italian Hall suffocated; only Frank Snyder, shot by the militia at Ludlow, died of gunshot wounds. They died in grown-ups’ labor disputes that affected the quality of their young lives, and that might have shaped their adult options, but they did not share a common risk of death by suffocation with most other working-class children. They died in collective struggles. Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, seeming victims of individual violence, nonetheless shared such risks with other Black youth. Miners’ children in 1913–1914 did not wake up each morning afraid they’d be suffocated that day. A century later, African American children in the United States still face the threat of potential random armed violence.

Italian Hall and Ludlow entered popular memory as forcefully as they did because children died in both tragedies, yet the focus on child victims often obscured the larger history of industrial conflicts in which they were embedded. Children participated in the strike parades and pickets; perhaps they threw rocks and taunts at scabs, as children had in other labor conflicts.⁵¹ But children had not died in strikes before, at least not so many, so dramatically. Their fathers, though, died in large numbers, underground and of occupational diseases like silicosis. Mother Jones suggested that no one cared about the miners’ conditions until women and children died. “Little children roasted alive make a front page story,” she said. “Dying by inches . . .does not.” She also famously urged the faithful to “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.” ⁵² That, in more genteel language, is Sybrina Fulton’s message. It was Mary Petrucci’s, too.

So how might a history of tragic losses speak to the present? At the memorial ceremony in Calumet in June 2013, Calumet village President Dave Geisler called Italian Hall a “senseless act of violence” and connected it to then-recent mass shootings in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater; the Sandy Hook, Connecticut, elementary school; and the Boston Marathon bombing. Drawing parallels between Italian Hall and these tragedies, he said, “Such violence continues today.”⁵³ It does—but I think Calumet and Ludlow are more accurately linked to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, which also occurred in contexts of contested social power and which might be seen as symptoms of mass phenomena, if not as mass murders. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley contrasted the deaths of twenty school children at Sandy Hook and the murder of Trayvon Martin, writing that “In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre,” the National Rifle Association and its supporters insisted “that had the teachers and administrators been armed, those twenty little kids . . .would be alive today,” but that they had not “argued that had Trayvon Martin been armed, he would be alive today.”⁵⁴

Trayvon Martin may evoke historical links to Ludlow and Italian Hall only for me and a handful of labor historians. He has more often evoked comparisons with other African American youths who carried the burdens of racial profiling and struggles for Black equality in past decades. Oprah Winfrey unintentionally provoked a heated argument with Fox News pundit Glenn Beck when she compared Trayvon Martin to Emmett Till, who was fourteen in August 1955 when he went from his home in Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi and violated local norms by saying, “Bye, baby,” to a White woman at a store. Kidnapped four days later by her husband and brother-in-law, Till’s body was fished out of the Tallahatchie River a few days later, bound to a cotton gin fan, a bullet in his skull, his eye gouged out and one side of his forehead crushed. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open casket to “let the world see what they did to my boy,” and this picture was burned into the memory of an American generation, especially young African Americans. Till’s killers were acquitted by an all-White jury. They then sold their story of his murder to Look magazine for $4000. Beck found it “offensive” for Winfrey to compare Till and Martin. He “call[ed] it evil to compare these events” because, he said, Zimmerman acted in self-defense but Till was brutally murdered by racists.⁵⁵

The Winfrey-Beck debate captured a national discourse across a racial divide that cannot be bridged until we examine law in the sometimes unconscious but nonetheless structured racial contexts within which it operates. The dead children at Ludlow and Italian Hall, like Emmett Till and like too many twenty-first-century American youngsters, died then and are dying now in part because they were and are devalued as racialized “others.” The names of the Italian Hall victims were not publicized at the time, at least partly because their names marked them as “others”—mostly Croatians, Serbs, and Finns—therefore foreign, maybe socialists. Until quite recently the United Mine Workers invoked the tragic loss of women and children at Ludlow but rarely used their names, because in 1914 names like Pedregone, Costa, and Petrucci marked them as dark, foreign, outsiders. When Mary Petrucci testified before the U.S. Industrial Relations Commission investigating the Ludlow Massacre, the New York Times reported that the audience was in tears. It went on to say that Petrucci was born in Colorado “of Italian parents twenty-four years ago and married when but 16. She spoke good English,” it marveled, “and impressed the audience as a woman of refinement above her station.”⁵⁶ Above her station. Unexamined racist assumptions suffused all these lost young lives. But a century later, the risk of racial violence had receded for Italian youth.

The charge of racial profiling sparked heated controversy about the Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis murders, and these exchanges recorded personal histories of racism. On March 15, 2012 Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart wrote: “One of the burdens of being a black male is carrying the heavy weight of other people’s suspicions. One minute you’re going about your life, the next you could be pleading for it, if you’re lucky. And far too many aren’t.” Capehart listed the lessons his mother taught him to survive: “‘Don’t run in public.’ Lest someone think you’re suspicious. ‘Don’t run while carrying anything in your hands.’ Lest someone think you stole something. ‘Don’t talk back to the police.’ Lest you give them a reason to take you to jail or worse.”⁵⁷

Other pundits echoed Capehart, climaxing on July 15, after the Zimmerman acquittal. Bracing for the “impossibly heartbreaking conversation” he could not bring himself to have with his children, New York Times columnist Charles Blow asked, “‘Now, what do I tell my boys?’ We used to say not to run in public because that might be seen as suspicious, like they’d stolen something. But according to Zimmerman, Martin drew his suspicion at least in part because he was walking too slowly. So what do I tell my boys now? At what precise pace should a black man walk to avoid suspicion? And can they ever stop walking away, or running away, and simply stand their ground?”⁵⁸ The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson wrote:

Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven innocent. This is the conversation about race that we desperately need to have—but probably, as in the past, will try our best to avoid. . . . I don’t know if the jury, which included no African Americans, consciously or unconsciously bought into this racist way of thinking—there’s really no other word. But it hardly matters, because police and prosecutors initially did. The assumption underlying their ho-hum approach to the case was that Zimmerman had the right to self-defense but Martin—young, male, black—did not. The assumption was that Zimmerman would fear for his life in a hand-to-hand struggle but Martin—young, male, black—would not. . . .The conversation we need to have is about how black men, even black boys, are denied the right to be young, to be vulnerable, to make mistakes.⁵⁹

The kids weighed in, too. Throughout the United States, demonstrators dressed in hoodies—as Martin was when he was killed—rallied to protest the verdict, to raise issues of racial profiling, and to contest Stand Your Ground laws. Howard University students posted a video on YouTube of students wearing hoodies asking if they, like Martin, should be presumed suspicious.⁶⁰ Florida students organized The Dream Defenders, who occupied Governor Rick Scott’s office for a month, trying to get him to call a special legislative session to consider their “Trayvon Martin Act,” to address racial profiling, “Stand Your Ground” laws, and school-to-prison pipeline issues. They failed to convince Scott or to get their special session, but they did get Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford to hold a hearing on Stand Your Ground.⁶¹ On March 10, 2014, Rev. Al Sharpton led a march of protestors, including Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, to the Florida state capitol. Calling Florida “ground zero” in the movement against Stand Your Ground laws, Sharpton said that “laws that tell people that they can shoot first and then ask questions later” violate “civil rights. . . .The law in effect says . . .if you imagine I’m a threat—you have the right to kill me.”⁶²

A majority of states have some version of Stand Your Ground. Texas A&M economists found in 2012 that their adoption correlated with a statistically significant 8 percent increase in murders and manslaughters.⁶³ Just as the children killed at Ludlow and Italian Hall were casualties of larger class and ethnic inequalities, it is not just African American children who die disproportionately from guns. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 11,078 Americans were murdered by firearms in 2010. That year homicide dropped below the top ten causes of death nationally for the first time since 1965, but not for people of color. CDC data indicated that a White person was five times as likely to commit suicide with a gun as to be shot with one, but an African American was five times more likely to be killed by someone else with a gun than to use one for suicide.⁶⁴ Stand Your Ground law enforcement reflects racial bias as well. According to one study using FBI data on homicides from 2005 to 2009, “White people who kill Black people in ‘Stand Your Ground’ states” were over three and a half times more likely than Blacks to be cleared of murder.⁶⁵ Not surprisingly, then, African Americans favor stricter gun control almost four to one, while Whites are about evenly split.⁶⁶

Although President Obama weighed in for gun control, his direct comments on race focused less on law and politics, and more on the difficult conversation about deeply held racist assumptions. In a powerful speech during the 2008 presidential campaign, he spoke of his White grandmother, “a woman,” he said, “who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.”⁶⁷

After the Zimmerman verdict, on July 19, the President shared his own experience:

. . . when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. . . .There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me. . . .There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

“. . . [T]hose sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida,” he went on. The President suggested that a conversation on race could happen most honestly outside the political arena, in “families and churches and workplaces,” and challenged Americans to “ask . . .am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character? That would be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.” He wanted Americans to recognize that African Americans experienced “a lot of pain around what happened” because, he said, “the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”⁶⁸

History that doesn’t go away becomes painfully vivid through the repeated deaths of children, through the burdens some children have shouldered to make change. It may not matter which pieces of a tangled past speak directly to the present predicament—it could be Italian Hall and Ludlow, or Birmingham and Selma, or residential schools, or Emmett Till’s Money, Mississippi. Mamie Till-Mobley said in a 1996 interview that “People really didn’t know that things this horrible could take place. And the fact that it happened to a child, that ma[d]e all the difference in the world.”⁶⁹

Sybrina Fulton has staked her efforts for change in the hope that her son’s death might “make all the difference in the world.”

Trayvon was my son, but Trayvon is also your son. I just ask you, as a mother, as a grandmother, as an aunt, an uncle, a grandfather, to wrap your mind around what has happened. . . .Wrap your mind around no prom for Trayvon. . . .No college for Trayvon. No grandkids coming from Trayvon. All because of a law, a law that has prevented the person who shot and killed my son to be held accountable and to pay for this awful crime.⁷⁰

Sybrina Fulton suggested that George Zimmerman might not have killed her son if there had been no Stand Your Ground law in Florida to protect him from being held accountable for murder. Perhaps not; perhaps a White jury would have acquitted him anyway. President Obama did not directly address Stand Your Ground; he did invite Trayvon Martin’s and Jordan Davis’s parents to the White House February 27, 2014, when he announced his My Brother’s Keeper Initiative to provide support and opportunities for Black boys and men. And he invoked the same claim of common kinship as Sybrina Fulton, asking that we remember “that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction—towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.”⁷¹

These murdered children compel me, but so do the poignant hopes that Mamie Till-Mobley and Sybrina Fulton and Mary Petrucci have each tried to wring from their murdered children. In 2009 I was honored to speak at the dedication of the Ludlow National Historic Landmark, and I planned to conclude with Mary Petrucci’s story. During the ten-minute ride from my hotel in Trinidad to the Ludlow site, I learned that a ninety-year-old man named Frank Petrucci would be there. Five years after the Ludlow massacre, Mary and Thomas Petrucci began having babies again. They named the first three after the children who died at Ludlow; Frank was named for the six-month-old infant who died in his mother’s arms. Before the program, I introduced myself and asked Mr. Petrucci if it was okay for me to speak about his mother. Then, in the most extraordinary experience I have had as an historian, as I spoke I could see nothing but Frank Petrucci’s face—that held at that moment the legacy of the tragic past and of parents who dared to bring more babies into a still-imperfect world.

Mary Petrucci, according to her son and granddaughter, never sang again, but she risked enough hope to love more children.⁷² My first eagerly awaited grandchild was due the month after my 2014 lecture. As I spoke, I knew he would be born into a world not yet secure for all children. That reality certainly drew me to these stories, and I had to acknowledge that personal and presentist frame. I feared, as well, that these histories might only reinforce Canadian images of a violent and racist America. Still, I was pulled to these challenging stories for the difficult lessons they can wring from histories we’d rather avoid—the painful lessons of “a history that doesn’t go away.” History that doesn’t go away continues to wreak human consequences. It demands difficult questions and choices. If I remember Ludlow and Italian Hall, Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, then what am I doing to confront my own bias, what acts can I choose to make a better world for all babies? Or at least for some. Histories that don’t go away may break our hearts. How we use them might, in some small ways, make history.

Notes

Thanks to Victoria Buckholz for her research assistance.

1. 1 For accounts of Trayvon Martin’s death and public reaction, see Hasan Kwame Jeffries, “Justice Denied: The Killing of Trayvon Martin in Historical Perspective,” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective 7:2 (November 2013), https://origins.osu.edu/article/justice-denied-killing-trayvon-martin-historical-perspective/page/0/1, accessed March 2, 2014; Jonathan Capehart, “Under ‘suspicion’: The Killing of Trayvon Martin,” Washington Post, March 18, 2012; Greg Botelho, CNN, “What happened the night Trayvon Martin died,” May 23, 2012, https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/18/justice/florida-teen-shooting-details/index.html, accessed May 27, 2021; Julia Dahl, CBS News, “Trayvon Martin Shooting: A Timeline of Events,” July 12, 2013, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trayvon-martin-shooting-a-timeline-of-events/, accessed May 27, 2021.

2. 2 I watched most of the trial, which was televised. See also Washington Post Editorial Board, “Mr. Zimmerman goes free, but tragedy remains,” Washington Post, July 14, 2013; Jeffries, “Justice Denied.”

3. 3 Sybrina Fulton’s address can be viewed on-line via YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxWs-YtYa4E, as well as on several news links.

4. 4 Michael Dunn was found guilty of attempted murder of the three surviving teens in the car; he had not been found guilty of Jordan Davis’s murder when I delivered my 2014 lecture but was convicted of Davis’ murder in a second trial on October 1, 2014 and was sentenced to life in prison plus 90 years. His appeal was denied. See Samuel Momodu, “Jordan Russell Davis (1995–2012),” Black Past, October 6, 2017, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/davis-jordan-russell-1995-2012/, accessed May 26, 2017; Associated Press, “Loud music shooting: Michael Dunn guilty of attempted murder,” February 15, 2014; Derek Kinner, “Michael Dunn Verdict: Florida Man Found Guilty Of Attempted Murder In Loud-Music Trial,” Huffington Post, February 15, 2014; Julia Dahl, CBS News, “‘Loud music’ shooter Michael Dunn gets life in prison,” October 17, 2014, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/michael-dunn-loud-music-shooter-gets-life-in-prison/, accessed May 26, 2021.

5. 5 Katy Hall, Jan Diehm, and Alissa Scheller, “The Horrific Risk Of Gun Violence For Black Kids In America, In 4 Charts,” Huffington Post, August 19, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/black-children-gun-deaths_n_5692423, accessed May 28, 2021; Children’s Defense Fund, “Protect Children, Not Guns 2012” (Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund, 2012). According to Everytown Research and Policy, by 2024, more than 4,300 children and teens (ages 0 to 19) were shot and killed annually and more than 17,000 were shot and wounded. An estimated three million children witnessed a shooting each year. Gun violence continued to affect children of color disproportionately. Black children and teens in the United States were more than eighteen times more likely than White children to die by gun homicide, and thirteen times more likely to be hospitalized for a firearm assault than White children. Latinx children and teens were more than three times more likely to die by gun homicide than White children, https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-impact-of-gun-violence-on-children-and-teens/, accessed June 2, 2025.

6. 6 Hall, Diehm, and Scheller, “The Horrific Risk of Gun Violence.” In 2022, the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health reported that for three straight years gun violence was the leading cause of death among children and teens, outstripping both cancer and automobile crashes. Black children continued to suffer disproportionately. In 2022, in the 1 to 17 age group, Black children and teens had a gun death rate 18 times higher than that of White children. See “New Report Highlights U.S. 2022 Gun-Related Deaths: Firearms Remain Leading Cause of Death for Children and Teens, and Disproportionately Affect People of Color,” September 12, 2024, https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/guns-remain-leading-cause-of-death-for-children-and-teens, accessed June 2, 2025.

7. 7 Lucy McBath left a thirty-year career as a Delta Airlines flight attendant to run for Congress to further her fight for gun control. She became the first Democrat since 1979 to win election from Georgia’s 6^th Congressional District in 2018, a seat formerly held by Republicans Newt Gingrich and Johnny Isakson. She was re-elected in 2020, 2022, and 2024.

8. 8 The Trayvon Martin Foundation, https://www.trayvonmartinfoundation.org/, accessed March 28, 2014. The mission was subsequently reworded: “The Trayvon Martin Foundation was established by Sybrina Fulton & Tracy Martin in March of 2012. We are a non-profit organization whose main purpose is to provide both emotional and financial support to families who have lost a child to gun violence. Our goal is to shift the conversation from intervention to reform. Our programs are strengthening families through leadership, support, guidance, and counseling. The Foundation is supported by a network of individuals and companies who share a unified vision of a world free of senseless killings. Our core mission is to gain fellowship toward personal restoration and ultimately community building.” Accessed May 29, 2021.

9. 9 The most comprehensive published history of the 1913–1914 UMWA Ludlow strike is George S. McGovern and Leonard F. Guttridge, The Great Coal Field War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972). Other superb accounts of the Colorado coal wars can be found in Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry (New York: Paragon House, 1989); Howard Zinn, “The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–14,” in Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, eds. Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, and Robin D. G. Kelley (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 5–55; and John Graham, “Introduction” to Upton Sinclair, The Coal War (Boulder, CO: Colorado Associated University Press, 1976), vi–xcii. The most recent books are Scott Matelle, Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007) and Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), which places the events in the very broad context of environmental history.

10. 10 McGovern and Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War, 22. Between 1887–1897 the national average was 2.56 deaths per thousand coal miners; in Colorado the rate was much higher, 4.64 per thousand. Between 1884–1912, Colorado’s rate jumped to 6.81, while the national average was 3.12. James Brian Whiteside, “Protecting the Life and Limb of our Workmen: Work, Death, and Regulation in the Rocky Mountain Coal Mining Industry” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, 1986), 134.

11. 11 McGovern and Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War, 102; Graham, “Introduction,” xxvi. This section repeats material in Chapter 8, where I discuss the Ludlow strike and the efforts to achieve National Historic Landmark status for the Ludlow Massacre site.

12. 12 Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 273; Graham, “Introduction,” xxxiv.

13. 13 McGovern and Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War, 134, 146, 169.

14. 14 McGovern and Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War, 210–31.

15. 15 McGovern and Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War, 227–28, 231, 234–35; Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 291–93; “Two Women Depict Battle of Ludlow,” New York Times, February 4, 1915.

16. 16 “Mary Petrucci Remembers Her Four Little Children,” New York Tribune, February 4, 1915, https://weneverforget.org/hellraisers-journal-mrs-mary-petrucci-of-ludlow-there-is-sorrow-in-our-hearts-but-there-is-no-dishonor/#more-5985, accessed May 28, 2021; quoted in Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 300.

17. 17 Gary Kaunonen and Aaron Goings, Community in Conflict: A Working-Class History of the 1913–1914 Michigan Copper Strike and the Italian Hall Tragedy (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013). See also Vernon H. Jenson, Heritage of Conflict: Labor Relations in the Nonferrous Metals Industry Up to 1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950), 272–88, and Larry D. Lankton, Cradle to Grave: Life, and Work and Death at the Lake Superior Copper Mines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

18. 18 Lankton, Cradle to Grave, 100–04; Aaron Goings, “100 Years Later: Michigan’s 1913–14 Copper Country Strike,” Labor Online, Labor and Working Class History Association website, July 21, 2013, https://www.lawcha.org/2013/07/25/100-years-later-michigans-1913-14-copper-country-strike/, accessed March 30, 2014.

19. 19 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 149–65; Goings, “100 Years Later”; Jenson, Heritage of Conflict, esp. 277.

20. 20 McGovern and Guttridge, 51–52. The figures are from Report Upon the Possible Service of the Young Men’s Christian Association the Mining Communities of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1915, cited in a superb unpublished essay that Camille Guérin-Gonzales prepared as a member of the Labor and Working Class History Association Ludlow Committee, “Ludlow Monument NHL Nomination Narrative Draft,” 5, in author’s possession.

21. 21 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 45–65, 117–19.

22. 22 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 119–21; 150.

23. 23 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 131–33; McGovern and Guttridge, The Coalfield War, 90, 122–23; Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 267, 278.

24. 24 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 149, 153–54.

25. 25 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 153, 155–56; Margaret Fazekas Testimony, “Conditions in the Copper Mines of Michigan: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Mines and Mining, House of Representatives, Sixty-third Congress, Second Session, Pursuant to H. Res. 387, a Resolution Authorizing and Directing the Committee on Mines and Mining to Make an Investigation of the Conditions in the Copper Mines of Michigan” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1914).

26. 26 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 116, 124–25; McGovern and Guttridge, The Coalfield War, 114–15, 171–72, 189–92.

27. 27 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 176–77.

28. 28 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 176–77, 167–73; Historic American Buildings Survey, Italian Hall (Societa Mutua Beneficenza Italiana), HABS No. MI-425, Calumet, Houghton County Michigan, Written Historical and Descriptive Data, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., https://web.archive.org/web/20170223052714/https://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/habshaer/mi/mi0600/mi0643/data/mi0643data.pdf, accessed May 30, 2021.

29. 29 For contemporary coverage of the Italian Hall Tragedy, see New York Times, “Xmas Tree Panic Costs 80 Lives,” December 25, 1913; “Wants U.S. Inquiry in Calumet Horror,” New York Times, December 26, 2013; “Calumet Inquiry Urged on Congress,” New York Times, December 29, 2013. The best published account is Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 167–98; see also Goings, “100 Years Later.”

30. 30 Miners’ Bulletin, December 24, 1913, quoted in Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 180.

31. 31 Most sources say seventy-three died at Italian Hall, but the exact figure may be obscured by conflicting accounts of the dead. See Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 168, 181–87, 190–92.

32. 32 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 186–89, 199–219.

33. 33 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 192, 222–27.

34. 34 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 194–95; “Calumet Buries Dead,” Washington Post, December 29, 1913.

35. 35 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 186, 190–94, 200–201, 203; “Acquit Union’s Foes of Calumet Panic,” New York Times, January 1, 2014.

36. 36 See note 4 above.

37. 37 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 149–51, 153–56, 194.

38. 38 McGovern and Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War, 282–84, 289–92, 295–96, 302, 304, 329–31, 335; Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 312–13.

39. 39 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 229, 232–33, 240–41.

40. 40 Kaunonen and Goings, Community in Conflict, 195–97.

41. 41 Graham, “Introduction,” lvi–lxii. Sinclair’s Ludlow novels were King Coal (1917) and The Coal War (1976). King Coal is the better known. The Coal War, billed as a sequel, could not find a publisher because it was so clearly based on Ludlow, and was finally published in 1976 through the efforts of Sinclair scholar John Graham.

42. 42 Goings, “100 Years Later.”

43. 43 James Foster, “The Ten Day Tramps,” Labor History 23:4 (Autumn 1982): 608–23.

44. 44 Lucy Hough, “100 Year Ago, The Italian Hall Disaster,” https://upsupply.co/journal/italian-hall-disaster-1913, accessed May 30, 2021.

45. 45 Ella Reeve Bloor, We Are Many (New York: International Publishers, 1940), 118–38.

46. 46 Quoted in an e-mail from Aaron Goings to author, March 28, 2014.

47. 47 Kurt Hauglie, “Ceremony conducted at Italian Hall site,” The Daily Mining Gazette, June 21, 2013.

48. 48 “Archives Premiers New Exhibit about 1913 Strike,” Michigan Tech Archives Blog, October 28, 2012, Calumet/Archives%20Premiers%20New...%20_%20Michigan%20Tech%20Michigan%20Tech%20Archives%20Blog.htm, accessed February 26, 2014; “Registration for UP History Conference Extended through Monday,” Michigan Copper Miners’ Strike 2013–2014 Centennial, June 21, 2013, Calumet/Registration%20for%20UP%20History%20Conference%20Extended%20Through%20Monday%20_.htm, accessed February 26, 2014.

49. 49 Members of the commission were: scholars Thomas Andrews (University of Colorado), Karin Larkin (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs), Fawn-Amber Montoya (Colorado State University-Pueblo), Jonathan Rees (Colorado State University-Pueblo), and Dean Saitta (University of Denver); Robert Butero (United Mine Workers of America); public historians William Convery (History Colorado), Dawn DiPrince (Pueblo History Museum, History Colorado), and Victoria Miller (Bessemer Historical Society); Josephine Jones (Colorado Humanities); and Adam Morgan (Colorado National Guard). “Commemoration Commission, Ludlow 100 website, https://ludlow100.wordpress.com/commission/, accessed June 7, 2021.

50. 50 “Children of Ludlow: Life in a Battle Zone,” History Colorado website,https://www.historycolorado.org/exhibit/children-ludlow, accessed June 7, 2021.

51. 51 Kathleen Welch Chapman, oral history interview, Wheat Ridge, Colorado, April 27, 1979.

52. 52 Mary Field Parton, ed., Mary Harris Jones, The Autobiography of Mother Jones (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1925), 19, 40–41.

53. 53 Hauglie, “Ceremony conducted at Italian Hall site.” Twelve people were killed and seventy injured in a mass shooting June 20, 2012, at the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Twenty-six people were murdered, twenty of them children, in a mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut, December 14, 2012. On April 13, 2013, two terrorists detonated two homemade bombs at the running of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds others, seventeen of whom lost limbs.

54. 54 Robin D. G. Kelley, “The U.S. V. Trayvon Martin: How the System Worked,” Huffington Post, July 15, 2013, also posted on UCLA Newsroom, July 16, 2013, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/the-u-s-v-trayvon-martin-how-the-247451, accessed July 25, 2013.

55. 55 “Glenn Beck: Oprah’s Trayvon Martin Comment ‘Offensive,’ ‘Evil’ (VIDEO),” HuffPost, August 7, 2013, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/glenn-beck-oprah-trayvon-martin_n_3719560, accessed February 17, 2014. For Emmett Till’s murder, see Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) and Eyes on the Prize, Episode 1 “Awakenings (1954–1956)” (series produced for PBS by Blackside, Inc., Henry Hampton producer). “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” Look, January 24, 1956, published the confessions of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, two White men who had been acquitted in the 1955 kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till.

56. 56 “TWO WOMEN DEPICT BATTLE OF LUDLOW: Audience in Tears as Miner’s Wife Tells of Smothering of Three Children,” New York Times, February 4, 1915.

57. 57 Jonathan Capehart, “Under ‘suspicion’: The killing of Trayvon Martin,” Washington Post, March 18, 2012.

58. 58 Charles M. Blow, “The Whole System Failed Trayvon Martin,” New York Times, July 15, 2013.

59. 59 Eugene Robinson, “Black boys denied the right to be young,” Washington Post, July 15, 2013.

60. 60 Howard University Trayvon Martin “Am I Suspicious?” Campaign Video, YouTube, posted March 25, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH5bB8HUWFs, accessed July 17, 1913.

61. 61 “The Dream Defenders’ occupation to end racial profiling and repeal Stand Your Ground laws in Florida, 2013,” Global Nonviolent Action Database, https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/dream-defenders-occupation-end-racial-profiling-and-repeal-stand-your-ground-laws-florida-20, accessed June 2, 2021.

62. 62 Associated Press, “Al Sharpton leads protests against Florida’s stand-you-ground law,” The Guardian, March 10, 2014.

63. 63 “Texas A&M Study Says Castle-Doctrine Laws Increase Homicides, Don’t Deter Crime,” Dallas Observer, June 12, 2012.

64. 64 Sherry L. Murphy, B. Jiaquan Xu, and Kenneth D. Kochanek, “Deaths: Final Data for 2010,” Division of Vital Statistics, Centers for Disease Control, National Vital Statistics Report 61:4 (May 8, 2013). By 2024 deaths from firearms were declining, the result of some gun control laws and declining gun sales. Deaths from firearms peaked during the pandemic at over 21,000 in 2021. The figure for 2023 was almost 19,000; in 2024, there were 16,576 U.S. firearms deaths, excluding suicide; 5151 children and teenagers were shot in 2024, of whom 1403 died. “Gun Violence by the Numbers in 2024,” The Trace, https://www.thetrace.org/2024/12/data-gun-violence-shooting-stats-america/, accessed June 3, 2025.

65. 65 Jill Reilly, “White people who kill black people in ‘Stand Your Ground’ states are 354% more likely to be cleared of murder,” Daily Mail, July 15, 2013, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2363939/White-people-kill-black-people-Stand-Your-Ground-states-354-likely-cleared-murder-Fresh-questions-self-defence-law-wake-Zimmerman-verdict.html, accessed July 18, 2013.

66. 66 ABC News/Washington Post Poll: Hot-Button Issues, April 30, 2009, https://abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/1089a6HotButtonIssues.pdf, accessed June 3, 2021.

67. 67 “A More Perfect Union,” speech delivered by Senator Barack Obama in Philadelphia, March 18, 2008. The full text of Senator Obama’s historic speech is widely available on the internet. I accessed the transcript from The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2008.

68. 68 “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin,” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, July 19, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvon-martin, accessed June 7, 2013.

69. 69 Mamie Till Mosley in an interview in December, 1996 with Devery S. Anderson, author of Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015).

70. 70 Sybrina Fulton to National Urban League, Philadelphia, Friday, July 26, 2013, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxWs-YtYa4E.

71. 71 “Transcript: Obama announces ‘My Brother’s Keeper’,” CNN, February 27, 2014, https://www.cnn.com/2014/02/27/politics/obama-brothers-keeper-transcript/index.html, accessed March 22, 2014.

72. 72 Interview with Mary Elaine Petrucci, Frank Petrucci, and Mary Rose, Denver, August 8, 2013.