The Daily Worker

Our Twenty-Two White and Negro Brothers Must Not Have Died in Vain

By J. LOUIS ENGDAHL.

THEY died together—eleven white workers and eleven Negro workers—when Furnace No. 2, of the Westward Coal and Iron company, two miles east of Bessemer, Alabama, collapsed and disgorged an avalanche of super-heated liquid steel.

The hissing, sputtering lava flood turned them all to the same color. Bones and flesh and blood were charred completely black as all life was crushed out of the bodies of these workers by the death-dealing mass of molten metal.

The local Jim Crow press of the steel mill owners kept the workers segregated to the last. In giving the list of dead, the Birmingham, Alabama, Age-Herald, separated the columns of names into "White" and "Negroes." That was the way the Associated Press carried the news out over the country. Here are the lists:

WHITE:

BILL RUTHERFORD.

FORREST LAWLEY.

E. B. MARTIN.

JESS WOLFF.

HENRY HAPGOOD.

J. T. DENSMORE.

WILLIAM ACKER.

C. A. HUMPHRIE.

B. B. WISE.

BEN WHITE.

HOWARD E. MUSSEY.

NEGRO:

HENRY FUNDERBURG.

CLIFF BALL.

JOE CADE.

JOHN DEAN.

E. HOLTON.

PERCY COLLINS.

WILLIAM PERRY.

EDWARD BROWN.

EDWARD BIBB.

EARLY BROWN.

HENRY CALHOUN.

That is the way the steel mill owners, like all exploiters, wish to have workers divided, into white and Negro, into native-born and foreign-born, into Catholic, Jew, Protestant and unbeliever. That makes it easy for the capitalist ruling class to continue the workers as a subject class.

"The furnace was rotten inside," is the charge made. It was rotten alike for all the workers who madly toiled within its brilliant glow at 5:30 o'clock, Saturday morning, when death came. No one had been picked for special warning.

The blast that blew the top off the furnace, and sent 400 tons of fiery death sputtering in all directions, was the first danger signal and it came too late for white and Negro worker alike.

The non-union conditions, that result in rotten furnaces being used because life is cheap and new furnaces cost money, had to be faced alike by both white and Negro workers.

They are but a repetition of the disasters in the non-union coal mines, within recent months in this same industrial area, that claimed 52 lives at Overton, and then 27 more lives at Mossboro, of white and Negro workers alike.

There are hundreds of widows and orphans alike, of both white and Negro workers, in Alabama today as a result of these three major disasters. These helpless survivors have no union to fight for even the most meager price that might be put on the lives of the worker dead.

These recurring disasters must blast into the minds of southern labor the necessity of economic organization in spite of the terror regime of the entrenched bosses. The United Mine Workers of America draws no race line between its members: The heroic struggles of the Alabama miners to establish their union must continue until victory has been achieved. A powerful miners' union in Alabama becomes the best ally of cruelly enslaved labor in the steel mills. It will help the steel workers build their union. But it must be built on the same broad lines as the coal miners' union, wiping out race, nationality and religious lines. If the sight of the funeral pyre of 22 white and Negro steel workers, at Bessemer, Alabama, will inspire the living workers to renewed struggles, then these murdered workers will not have died in vain.