212 ChaPter^4
plants organized 100 percent and production cannot be resumed without
them. If the workers win it will be the beginning of a new era in the struggle
of labor to emancipate itself.” [As for Briggs, the company owner, Walter,
bought the Detroit Tigers in 1935 and refused to allow Blacks to sit in box
seats and was the next-to-last team in baseball to sign an African American
player].
Teachers in Chicago, not better off than the Briggs workers, fought back
as well. They founded the Chicago Teachers Union and stayed on the job
despite not getting paid, but raised over $100,000 for clothing and breakfast
for their poor students. In March 1933, however, the teachers learned that
janitors, many of them friends of local politicians, had gotten raises while their
pay was being cut. They then marched on the mayor’s office and then on
banks that had received millions in federal aid. The teachers were angrier in
April, when over 5000 of them went to Chicago’s largest banks, turned over
desks, smashed windows, and threw ink on the walls, demanding “Pay us! Pay
us!” as they created havoc. This action got the mayor’s attention, and he
announced that the teachers would receive 4 of the 9 months pay owed to
them immediately. He did not, however, demand that local banks loan money
to the schools, as they consistently had refused to do amid the depression, and
watched as the Chicago Board of Education approved even more cuts in July.
By the beginning of the next school year, tens of thousands of teachers and
citizens protested so much that the Board had to repeal its cuts. In 1934, with
money from the federal government, Chicago teachers finally got all their pay
back.
On the West coast, class struggle was just as contentious. In the spring of
1933, agricultural workers in California began a series of strikes that would
last throughout most of the year. Almost 50,000 workers participated in these
work protests, and most were under the direction of radical and communist
cannery unions. All told, farm workers picking cherries, pears, peas, peaches,
sugar beets, grapes, and, finally, cotton went on strike. The cotton strike in
October was the largest, with over 12,000 workers leaving the fields. Cotton
pickers wanted their pay raised from 60 cents to a dollar per 100 pounds
picked [it had been $1.50 in 1929]. The growers themselves, while resisting
higher wages, began to fear that the strikers might destroy the cotton crops
so called out their private security forces to remove over 200 striker families
from their homes and often attack them. The violence peaked on October