NATIONAL "WORK OR WAGES" CONVENTION JULY 4th & 5th, AT CHICAGO, ILL

Detroit: Michigan District Unemployed Councils, 1930. Printed handbill with text to recto only. Folded vertically to middle; some short tears at , perimeter not affecting text; toned and creased; some penciled calculations (seemingly a budget of some sort being worked out) to verso. Very good.. 1930 handbill illustrating the plight of the unemployed in the onset of the Great Depression and urging for organization and attendance of all unemployed workers for the National Unemployment Convention to be held that July in Chicago. The bottom section holds a blank form for labor organizations to send notice regarding their delegation size, after calling on "all workers, organized and unorganized, in unemployed councils, trade unions, shop locals and committees, local industrial leagues and groups to send MASS DELEGATIONS TO THE NATIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT CONVENTION AT CHICAGO JULY 4th AND 5th! In preparation, send three (3) delegates to the MICHIGAN DISTRICT UNEMPLOYMENT CONFERENCE, THURSDAY, JUNE 12, at 7:30 p.m., at 3782 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Mich."


This National Unemployment Conference is related as a pivotal moment in labor organizer and early civil rights leader Angelo Herndon's political awakening. As he outlines in the 1934 pamphlet You Cannot Kill the Working Class: "In June, 1930, I was elected a delegate to the National Unemployment Convention in Chicago. Up to this point I had been staying with relatives in Birmingham. They were under the influence of the Negro misleaders and preachers, and they told me that if I went to the convention I need never come to their house again. The very morning I was to leave, I found a leaflet on my doorstep, put there by the Ku Klux Klan.

I went to Chicago, riding the rods to get there.

[...]

In Chicago, I got my first broad view of the revolutionary workers' movement. I met workers from almost every state in the union, and I heard about the work of the same kind of organizations in other countries, and it first dawned on me how strong and powerful the working-class was. There wasn't only me and a few others in Birmingham. There were hundreds, thousands, millions of us!

My family had told me not to come back. What did I care? My real family was the organization. I'd found that I had brothers and sisters in every corner of the world, I knew that we were all fighting for one thing and that they'd stick by me.