On Monday, May 1, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, activists, and workers of all stripes are expected to take to the streets in cities across the country and the globe to commemorate International Workers’ Day, aka May Day.
May Day’s origins are centered around the call for an eight-hour workday, a fact of life many of us take for granted but which was fought for fiercely by industrial workers facing brutal conditions in the late 19th century. And it was in Chicago, then a rapidly industrializing city, that these calls reached a fever pitch in 1886, resulting in the violent tragedy of the Haymarket Massacre.
Under these conditions the radical views of socialist and anarchist groups began to spread throughout American cities, offering more democratic and humane visions of how society could be organized.
These proclamations set the stage for the massive strikes that would engulf the nation on that historic date. More than 35,000 people walked off the job and marched through the streets of Chicago on what is now known as the first May Day demonstration, part of a nationwide general strike that saw more than 300,000 participants.
The red scare and activist witch hunt that followed did great damage to the labor movement in the United States, and led to Parsons, Spies, and other agitators being hung from the gallows. But in many ways the Haymarket tragedy also set the grounds for May 1 as a worldwide day of action for workers’ rights.
The tradition was continued in Chicago in 2006, when more than 500,000 took to the streets demanding rights for immigrants and undocumented workers in one of the largest demonstrations in the city’s modern history.
