7 July
’Fifty years ago there was a cry against slavery and men gave up their lives to stop the selling of black children on the block. Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers.’ Mother Jones
Today in 1903, Mary Harris (’Mother’) Jones led the ‘March of the Mill Children’ from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s summer home, some 100 miles way in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York. The march was to protest the working conditions of children and demand a 55-hour working week limit. Roosevelt refused to see them.
‘Every day little children came into Union headquarters, some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle. They were stooped things, round shouldered and skinny. Many of them were not over ten years of age, the state law prohibited their working before they were twelve years of age.’
Mother Jones
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