May Day, or International Workers’ Day, is a commemoration of the collective fight for dignity, equity, and labor rights worldwide. Today, as we go to press on May 1, 2024, students, workers, and community members gather at Science Hill to recognize May Day. As we write, students in Quarry Plaza set up an encampment in solidarity with Palestine.
As Israel continues to use U.S. money to bomb Palestinian citizens into silence, U.S. universities abandon, threaten, and punish students for refusing complacency during an active genocide. Yesterday, peaceful protesters at UCLA were attacked with projectiles, tear gas, and mace by Zionist counter-protestors without UCLAPD intervention. The same day, Columbia University deployed the NYPD to clear Hamilton Hall of peaceful protestors, resulting in forceful arrests of around 280 individuals from City College of New York and Columbia University.
Despite the threat of arrest, assault, and academic retaliation, UC Santa Cruz students have united with university organizers across the nation, unwavering in their commitment to collective action against oppression. This May Day, we must remind ourselves that our connection to a global community of resistance is essential to know the truth, and fight for justice.
May 1 commemorates the Haymarket affair, where on May 3, 1886, a violent clash between Chicago factory workers striking for an 8-hour work day and police left several strikers wounded and six dead. The workers’ deaths rallied labor activists to Haymarket Square the next day, where an unknown individual detonated a bomb and police opened fire on the crowd. The ensuing violence killed an estimated four to eight civilians and seven officers. Desperate to lay blame, police arrested eight so called “anarchists,” many of whom were not even present at the rally.
They were convicted of murder and four were hanged in a trial that would later be infamously regarded as unfounded and biased. The Haymarket affair inspired global outrage, and May 1 was declared Workers’ Day by an international coalition of socialist groups and trade unions.
Despite the galvanizing impact of this event, and its rootedness in U.S. history, President Grover Cleveland, uncomfortable with the socialist origins of May Day, created an official U.S. Labor Day on the first Monday of September. This action has markedly separated the United States from the global community of workers, disconnecting us from the origins of Labor Day and its roots in resistance and global solidarity.
As independent student journalists, we are beholden to no institution, no administrative agenda. To say we write for you would be inaccurate, because there is no “us” or “you,” only “we.” For students, by students, means we at City on a Hill Press report to uplift, empower, and disseminate student voices – our voices. We write to truth; we write to power; we write for change.
In the words of August Spies, a radical labor activist, newspaper editor, and one of the hanged Haymarket anarchists, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”
