CO nin . ¥ Wnty » IiieeeeneE — Tom McEwen uu JN the early hours of January 17, 1953, oa the City of Vancouver, Canada, a st “Picked coroner’s jury brought in its Hy N version of a verdict on the “when, fre, and how” a Negro longeshoreman fame to his death. This (certain people hoped) was the Xelusion of the celebrated “Clarence ae Case,” determining how the cause a we can happen long before the cause a cath happens. Sounds complicated, at it? But it’s all very simple. CO. Tama worker. My skin is black, white, “ial brown, red—what the hell’s the pao ose I have been, blinded with the TR of back-breaking work . . . and Vso in o €en blinded with the fatigue of look- a ae work—because the onus of keep- 8 alive is always on me. : eh either way. In the job of trying ., *€ep alive I have worked in gas-filled Mines, ne breathing deadly gas and silica aily until the old bellows gave out. ig Worked in the big highball timber the fd and seen my guts smeared over hi utt-end of a big log. Lots of money . timber—for somebody else. ave worked in the glory-hole of sa freighters and had my carcass par- shipo with s¢alding steam because the of pers wanted to get as much out Sion old boilers as they got out of me. since. IT Survived to toil again... b Reet eo didn’t. I have worked my Fe the off Slinging hash . . . and lived on the ea after a twelve-hour stretch. In Yallroag ne days of this continent, buried magnates and empire builders to Ay sae kind by the score. It helped _ | my ina their grades and rock-cuts—and the emu: VS the cheapest commodity ini “pire building game. ‘ees om ‘is black, white, yellow, brown ave call € hell’s the difference? They ‘Tigger ed Me bohunk, wop, coon, dago, ’ con. limejuicer, fore hist. Ompunien , foreigner, anarchist, Th ae st : S e€ Onus ty na they cracked the whip. In p thes. as to keep on living I fell down . Rar trees of Ships, off scaffolds, high Pe rool s and. higher windows. Sometimes Sometin ave in in the mine buried me; didn, “ST got out . . . sometimes I + *. it’s all on the record ‘and the is still to come. : 1g and little mills the whining busin fingers, hands, arms. So what! ct] us of keeping on living was Bay business. The onus was on, ; ote a million coroner's juries WEN at } T am “negligent,” “careless” Million .2ve you? “Haven’t they said a - Acheq a Over that “no blame is at- : eat eS ee of Skinem, Peelem and ao what the taaay pte Fenty, Dubb.” <9 Worker, You know what that t doesn’t only mean I work for ~~ when some respectable bozo my work profitable. It also iS al was before some court, dead ae i Y status cuts a sorry figure. “ve Pm “negligent,” and if I'm \ Publ Tom McEwen, Editor Canada and British io: One Year $3.00... < One Year $4.00 . . Printed by Authorized é ’ chussets death house. Pacific TRIBUNE / ‘lished Weekly at Room 6 - 426 Main Street, Vancouver 4, BC. wee Phone: MArine 5288 , — ~ Hal Griffin, Associate Editor Subscription Rates: - Commonwealth countries (except Australia) dead it’s a straight case of “malingering.” If I’m alive my “social status” rates the front page only if I’m accused of mur- der, and if I’m dead the hazards of try- ing to keep alive are decreed the prime factors in my premature exit!s @. You see what a worker is up against, And particularly when. he’s got a black, brown or yellow skin. It’s like saying that the killers of Sacco and* Vanzetti didn’t actually kill these two Italian work- ers in 1927 when they burned out their lives in the electric chair*in a Massa- This final act was merely the sequence of an “accident” sustained by ‘a good shoemaker and a poor fish pedlar’ 20 years before in the hazardous business of earning a liveli- hood. By the same coroner’s brand of “reas- oning” it could be argued that it wasn’t a police bullet which caused “Ginger” Goodwin’s death in 1917 at Cumberland, but rather that this union miner and fearless organizer had allegedly fallen down a mine shaft ten years before in the normal course of trying to earn a ‘livelihood, and ‘that his injuries from the imagined accident were “aggravated” by a police bullet. The same could be said of Bill Davis of Nova Scotia, the three Estevan miners murdered by the RCMP during the Este- van miners strike, of Nick Zanchuk of Montreal. According to the new tech- nique of official reasoning and whitewash, all those workers could very easily have had “accidents” in the course of their hazardous scramble for a_ livelihood, which, when “aggravated” by a police club, fist or bullet, resulted in death. Just as easy and simple as that! So, I am-a worker. My skin is black, ‘white, yellow, brown .. . maybe a mix- ture of all four. I am a miner, a bell- hop, a carpenter, a laborer, a waiter, a seaman, a longshoreman. Anything and everything. Before I was dead I was passably healthy. I ‘had to be if I hoped to hold a job. Since the onus of keeping alive was on me, I had to hold a job— any job. Longshoring isn’t an easy job; at least, I have never heard any long- shoreman argue that it was. After I was dead they “swore” I wasn’t healthy—in order to prove how “unnat- ural” was the manner of my dying. Doesn’t make sense, except perhaps to a coroner’s. jury—with a real live “Social- -ist’” thrown in to illustrate how “de- mocracy” works in such cases! : I am a worker. And just because my skin has many colors, I too sit on juries; not in courtrooms, but deep in the mines, in the forests, out on the seas, on the © job ... everywhere. I weigh up my own . evidence, gathered from centuries of ex- perience in the hazardous business of liv- - ing—and dying. The “weight of evidence” as the legal fraternity say, is all on my ~ side, alive or dead, and workers do not forget their dead, black, white, yellow or brown! They said that in life I wasn’t much good, and the sordid details, rolled out with proper official decorum, made a handy ouija board upon which to deter- mine what caused me to die? The jury on which I sit have an answer for that one too. It could be heard in. the deep groan of indignation that followed the announcement of this phoney verdict in- side a coroner’s court. And it will be heard on the outside, wherever working men meet and work, in ever-increasing volume. It is heard in a demand for jus- tice—in a protest against frameup of the dead, and violence against the living. It is a verdict which says Jimcrow ‘doesn’t look any less evil in a Canadian court than it does in a KKK Alabama lynch mob! . | Six*Months $1.60 , Australia, United States and all other countries Six Months $2.50 Union Printers Ltd., 550 Powell Street, Vancouver 4, BC. as second class mail, Post Office Department, Ottawa Your voice can be decisive Te surge of world democratic opinion, demanding that the Rosenbergs be saved from judicial murder in the electric chair, rolls forward like a mighty wave. Picket lines gather before U.S. consulates in almost every world centre. On this continent too, all classes of people voice the demand Save the Rosenbergs.’ The Communists, falsely accused by the cold war propaganda of “‘desiring’’ the death of the Rosenbergs, now are ing accused of fomenting the agitation to save their lives! The growing ~ volume of protest against this judicial murder shows such propaganda backfiring on its promoters. _ In this world-wide effort to save two Americans from the Yankee imperialist executioners, the question of guilt or innocence is not an issue. Their, lives saved, that can be determined Jater when the white heat of _ hysteria and prejudice has given place to normal reason and calm. : The demand to set aside the death sentence on the R is not merely a matter of saving the lives of an American husband and wife, father and mother to two sniall boys. It is a world struggle to halt the final ringing down the black curtain of Yankee reaction upon the great democratic traditions of the U.S. _ Help to save the Rosenbergs by writing President Truman today, urging him to grant executive clemency—and thereby restoring the hope of people everywhere for justice, 7 Truman's EVER was the insane war drive of U.S. imperialism better illustrated than in Truman’s last major pronounce- ment as president. On Christmas Eve, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin declared his willingness to consider a meeting with General Eis- enhower, U.S. president-elect, to dis- cuss easing international tension. Two weeks later Truman addresses himself to Stalin and completely ignores this offer. Instead, he pursues the fiction that Soviet policy has always envisioned an inevitable war by the Communist upon the capitalist world and tries to give it plausibility by suggesting that Lenin was 2 pre-atomic mam who did not re- alise the terribly destructive character of modern warfare. This is the crazy irresponsibility which one expects of Truman. The USSR was terribly devastated in both world wars. Its casualties in both were at least 20 times those of the U.S. No Soviet citizen needs to wait for an atom bomb to drop in order to understand: what war means. Truman indulges in an unmitigated slander on Lenin and on the USSR. Lenin always rejected the propagation of communism by means of war. He, like his great successor, Stalin, always stood for the peaceful co-exist- ence of the socialist world and the cap- PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JANUARY 16, 1953 — PAGE 5 decency, and ‘peace. atomania _ italist world, | Truman cannot produce a single policy statement of the Soviet govern- ment or of any Soviet leader, to justify his foul charge. He is, however, anx- ious to produce arguments in favor of further increasing U.S. arms expend- iture. _ t niet Truman can point to no hostile actions, no frenzied threats, no war propaganda of the Soviet Union against its neighbors. All the international pronouncements of Soviet statesmen have indicated their willingness to negotiate~a peaceful solution. Truman’s eulogy of the terribly destructive powers of the hydrogen bomb is at once an act of. worship — and an act of blackmail. While pretending to be horrified at the devastation which the use of these bombs might cause, he gloats over the fact that the greater part of this de- ee power is in the hands of the ‘Truman’s speech is an indication of the increasing desperation of the U.S. warmongers and their accelerating drive to war through extended intervention — in Asia and subversion in Europe. It can be countered only by all peacelov- ing patriotic Canadians redoubling their efforts for peace in Korea, to bring Canadian troops home and to extricate _ our country from! every U.S.-dictated _ commitment that threatens to involve — us in disastrous new foreign adventures. -