International Workers’ Day or International Labour Day is being celebrated after Chicago Haymarket massacre, also known as the Haymarket Affair, was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labour demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago.
The rally began peacefully in support of workers striking for an eight-hour workday; it was held the day after a May 3 rally at a McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant on the West Side of Chicago, during which two demonstrators had been killed, and many demonstrators and police had been injured. At the Haymarket Square rally on May 4, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police as they acted to disperse the meeting, and the bomb blast and ensuing retaliatory gunfire by the police caused the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; dozens of others were wounded.
Eight anarchists were charged with the bombing. They were convicted of conspiracy in the internationally publicized legal proceedings. The evidence put forward in the court trial was that one of the defendants may have built the bomb, but none of those on trial had thrown it, and only two of the eight were at the Haymarket at the time. Seven were sentenced to death, and one to a term of 15 years in prison. Illinois Governor Richard J. Oglesby commuted two of the sentences to terms of life in prison; another died by suicide in jail before his scheduled execution. The other four were hanged on November 11, 1887. In 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining defendants and criticized the trial.
The site of the incident was designated a Chicago landmark in 1992, and a sculpture was dedicated there in 2004. The Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997 at the defendants’ burial site in Forest Park, Illinois. The Haymarket affair is generally considered significant as the origin of International Workers’ Day held on May 1. It was also the climax of the period of social unrest among the working class in America, known as the Great Upheaval and Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
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