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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
stone@goblin.camp ("☮️ & 🍺 on 🌏") wrote:
On May 4, 1886, workers in Chicago were striking and demonstrating peacefully for an 8-hour workday. Police had killed one striker and injured several others the previous day, and when the cops showed up and began to disperse the PEACEFUL demonstration, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb towards the police. The explosion and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven cops and four civilians, as well as dozens of injuries, most of them from the confused gunfire of the police.
Following this, eight activists—some present at the demonstration, some at others, and some at home playing cards—were arrested and charged. The presiding judge was openly hostile to the defendants, as were the court bailiffs and all the jurors eventually seated to hear the case. (Any potential jurors who were union members or sympathetic to socialism were dismissed.)