Denver, CO – On June 22, eight Teamsters from Local 455 in Denver drove 200 miles south to attend the Ludlow Massacre Memorial near Trinidad, Colorado. For some, it was their first exposure to this type of history. Working class history is seldom taught in schools, and when it is, it is often taught from the perspective of the bosses.
Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), spoke on this at the memorial, saying “You can open up any textbook and find the name of the murderer, Rockefeller, but you will never find the names of the workers that bravely stood up for all working people!”
The Ludlow Massacre Memorial is held annually to serve as a reminder for working-class people of the struggles that took place to advance the labor movement. Coal miners at Ludlow were demanding better wages, an eight-hour day, less company control, a safer workplace, and the right to organize. When the miners went on strike over these issues, they were evicted from the company towns and forced to set up a colony of tents outside the mines. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who owned Colorado Fuel and Iron, hired private guards and worked with the Colorado National Guard to bring an end to the strike. The result was a massacre; tents were burned down, miners were shot, and many suffocated from the smoke of the fires. In all, 21 deaths were recorded, 11 of which were miners’ children.
The Teamsters who visited Ludlow had their own experiences of fighting the bosses. Just the day before, management called the police on the rank-and-file Teamsters for their distributing information about contractual and legal rights outside of their UPS hub. Their bosses saw workers fighting for better working conditions and tried to use force to remove them by alerting the police. The attempt did not work.
Bob Butero, the regional director of the UMWA, spoke to the crowd of people attending the memorial, stating, “You need to take this back with you, we cannot let this history die. It is up to us to keep it alive.” Teamsters Local 455 seeks to keep the history alive by returning to the Ludlow Massacre Memorial every year.
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