Bloody Friday in Minneapolis

On this site, on 20 July 1934, police shot 67 unarmed workers during the strike by Teamsters Local 574. During the 1934 strike, a police decoy truck carrying strikers was ambushed at 3rd Street and 6th Ave. on July 20, and an earlier confrontation on May 21 involved Citizen's Alliance deputies and police against strikers. Teamsters Local 574 Women's Auxiliary members fed striking workers, and strikers Henry Ness and John Belor died of their wounds in what became known as Bloody Friday. An investigation commission appointed by Governor Floyd B. Olson found that almost all 67 strikers were shot in the back. The 1934 strike was a watershed in American labor history: more than 6,000 workers demanded and won union recognition for Teamsters Local 574, defeated the anti-union Citizens Alliance that controlled city government, and made Minneapolis a union town. The strike was notable for militancy, with mass picketing, a daily strike newspaper, cruising pickets that halted truck movement throughout the city, women serving on the picket line and operating a commissary, and alliances with farmers and unemployed workers. About 100,000 people turned out for Henry Ness's funeral. A democratically elected Committee of 100 led the strike, and veteran union militants V.R. Dunne and Carl Skoglund, who had been expelled from the American Communist Party in 1928 as Trotskyists, were key strategists. The strike established industrial union organization for the first time in the trucking industry and set the stage for massive organizing that eventually transformed the International Brotherhood of Teamsters into a union of more than one million members. Teamsters Local 574 became Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544 in the mid-1930's and in 1998 merged with Teamsters Local 120, creating a Twin Cities-wide Teamsters union of 11,000 drivers, helpers, warehouse workers, and others.

Minneapolis, Minnesota · United States