Letter to Judge R.R. Stuart
1986 1986-03Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 10 →
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out on bail and warned not to return to the picket line. But we told the judge that we were going back. And we did-picking up some 50 pickets on the way.
After that, there were a series of arrests, each one with a greater amount of pickets-first 46, then 108, and in between many smaller numbers. Every time we went back from the courts and jail, the picket lines kept growing steadily until on May 23 there were 10,000 reported on the street in front of the plant.
Now when you have a mass picket line of thousands, it enables you to counter the company's offensive moves. For example, they brought out a high-pressure hose and turned a stream of water on us. But it didn't take very long for a couple of hundred pickets to take the hose away and turn the water on them.
Many times the police and deputies brutally clubbed the pickets; but before they could shove them into a patrol wagon enough pickets rushed in and grabbed the picket away and often gave them a taste of their own clubs.
You know that every good union has two educational committees: one to arrange lectures of all kinds and the other to educate scabs who won't attend classes.
The following is the letter sent by the Lucas County Unemployed League referred to elsewhere on this page by Ted Selander. Selander and Sam Pollock, two of its officers, wrote Judge R.R. Stuart to inform him of their intention to violate the injunction by encouraging mass picketing. They did so. They were arrested, tried, and released after being warned to cease picketing. They went directly from court to the picket line with all their fellow unemployed league members and strikers who had been present.
May 5, 1934 His Honor Judge Stuart County Court House Toledo, Ohio Honorable Judge Stuart:
On Monday morning May 7, at Auto-Lite plant, the Lucas Cou Unemployed League, in protest of injunction issued by your court, deliberately and specifically violate the nty the will the injunction enjoining us from sym -pathetically picketing peacefully in support of the striking Auto Workers Federal We sincerely believe that this court intervention, preventing us from picketing, is an abrogation of our democratic rights, contrary to our constitutional liberties and contravenes the spirit and the letter of Section 7a of the NRA.
Further, we believe that the spirit and intent of this arbitrary injunction is another specific example of an organized movement to curtail the rights of all workers to organize, strike and picket effectively.
Therefore, with full knowledge of the principles involved and the possible consequences, we openly and publicly violate an injunction which, in our opinion, is a suppressive and oppressive act against all workers.
County Unemployed I eague Anti-Injunction Com mittee Sec'y