08/31/2025
Find ACP Massachusetts tabling at the 41st annual Bread & Roses Heritage Festival in Lawrence, MA tomorrow, September 1 to commemorate the 1912 Lawrence textile strike!
The strike marks an important moment in the development of the labor and Communist movements in America. Started largely by immigrant and women workers fighting for more dignified pay, hours, and conditions in the mills of Lawrence, despite the naysaying of the AFL. Leaders of the IWW, Big Hill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn eventually came up to help win the strike.
Flynn eventually joined the Communist Party in the 30s, and became its leader in the 1960s until her death. Haywood was a founding member of the Party after the split, and is one of five Americans to be buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Red Square.
Today as 113 years ago, workers fight not just bread, but for roses, too.