Lynching
In early July 1917, Little arrived in Butte, Montana, to help organize a copper miners' union and lead a miners' strike against the Anaconda Copper Company. In the early hours of August 1, six masked men broke into Little's hotel room. He was beaten and taken to the edge of town where he was lynched from a railroad trestle. A note with the words "First and last warning" was pinned to his chest, along with the initials of other union leaders, and the numbers 3-7-77 (a vigilante code famously used by the vigilance committee of Virginia City, Montana).
It was widely believed that Pinkerton agents were involved, but no serious attempt was made by the police to apprehend Little's murderers. His funeral procession was followed by thousands as he was laid to rest in Butte's Mountain View Cemetery.
Read more about this topic: Frank Little (unionist)
Famous quotes containing the word lynching:
“No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“... lynching was ... a woman’s issue: it had as much to do with ideas of gender as it had with race.”
—Paula Giddings (b. 1948)