Ludlow Massacre Centennial Commemoration Events Under Way
One hundred years ago on Sunday, southern Colorado miners and their families walked out of the coal mines and mining camps striking for adequate wages, enforcement of state mining laws and union recognition. The strike led to a months-long struggle that culminated in one of the most tragic events in U.S. labor history, the April 20, 1914, Ludlow Massacre .
Yesterday, at the Ludlow Massacre memorial site near Trinidad, several hundred survivors’ descendants, Mine Workers ( UMWA ) members and officials, historians and others kicked off the centennial commemoration of the strike and massacre.
Upon striking, the miners and their families were evicted from their company-owned houses and the UMWA bought land and tents so that a series of tent colonies could be established throughout the area. Rising tensions throughout the winter finally exploded into the southern Colorado mine wars.
According to a UMWA history of the Ludlow Massacre:
The massacre occurred in a carefully planned attack on the tent colony by Colorado militiamen, coal company guards, and thugs hired as private detectives and strike breakers. They shot and burned to death 18 striking miners and their families and one company man. Four women and 11 small children died holding each other under burning tents. Later investigations revealed that kerosene had intentionally been poured on the tents to set them ablaze. The miners had dug foxholes in the tents so the women and children could avoid the bullets that randomly were shot through the tent colony by company thugs. The women and children were found huddled together at the bottoms of their tents.
UMWA Secretary-Treasurer Daniel Kane said:
We are once again seeing a greater and greater disparity between the wealthy and the rest of us, and greater control of the worldwide economy by giant corporations, just as was the case 100 years ago in this country and especially in the coalfields of southern Colorado.
Four years after the massacre, the UMWA erected a monument and maintained the site, including installing interpretive markers and displays, as well as building a shelter where the annual Ludlow Memorial is held.
But despite the efforts of family survivors, historians and labor activists, there was no state or national commemoration of the site until 2009 when the U.S. Department of the Interior designated Ludlow a National Historic Landmark.
Sunday’s event was first in what will be a series of events over the next nine months, sponsored by the UMWA and other organizations, highlighting this important yet largely forgotten time in American history
Click here for a detailed look at the Ludlow Massacre and other western mining conflicts by the Colorado Coal Field War Project .
