![]() “Crutch” Morris served on the executive committee in New York, and “Blind” Huber cochaired the “consultation of war” held outside the ferry building in Hoboken. Library of Congress.Īfrican American “Black” Diamond was elected to the Manhattan strike committee, and a kid known only as “Black Wonder” held strikers spellbound with his speeches at the Brooklyn Post Office. ![]() United States: American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. ![]() The film ends as the crowd forms around the two fighters. As they gather around the rear of the vehicle, a fight breaks out between two of the boys. On the side of the van is a sign reading New York World. As described by the Library of Congress, it shows a group of about fifty pre-adolescent boys running and crowding around a one-horse paneled newspaper van. To get an idea of what work looked like for the newsies, here is a clip from 1899. Brooklyn’s leaders included the Irish duo of “Race Track” Higgins, an adult, and “Spot” Conlon, aged 14. Dave Simons, also 18, was a Jewish boxing champion in the 105-pound class. Kid Blink (legal name Louis Balletti), the red-haired spokesman for the strikers in New York, was a charismatic 18-year-old Italian American with a bum eye. The strikers represented the full range of ages, ethnicities, and disabilities found in the news trade. New Englanders extended the boycott to New Haven, Norwalk, Danbury, and Hartford, Connecticut, and to Providence, Rhode Island, and Fall River, Massachusetts. Garden State newsboys joined in as well, starting with Jersey City, Hoboken, Newark, and Plainfield, then spreading to Bayonne, Trenton, Paterson, Elizabeth, and Asbury Park. Newsboys also honored the strike in the Westchester County communities of Yonkers, Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, Mamaroneck, and White Plains, and upstate in Troy, Saratoga, and Rochester. Most of the boys thus approached “saw.” Newsboys refused to handle the “yellow kid” dailies from Wall Street to Harlem, Brooklyn to the Bronx, and in the Staten Island towns of Clifton, Stapleton, and Tomkinsville. Following the example of adult trade unionists, the boys elected officers, formed a discipline committee, and sent envoys to spread the word: “Ye don’t sell no more World ’r Joinal ’r ye git yer face punched in - see?” “Go ahead and strike,” said the World ’s circulation manager. ![]() Three hundred of them met in City Hall Park on July 19 and pledged to strike if their demands weren’t met. Redressing grievances about paying wartime prices for peacetime papers gave newsies the chance to mobilize on their own behalf. Many working-class children - boys and girls - blocked tracks with debris and threw stones at nonunion drivers. It also coincided with a national strike wave, a local heat wave, and a militant protest by streetcar motormen in Brooklyn and Manhattan that kept police tied up. The revolt in Queens rekindled the boys’ discontent over price hikes imposed on them by Hearst and Pulitzer at the start of the Spanish-American War in 1898. The newsboys of New York, who struck against the price charged by some of the one-cent newspapers, attacked the men who took their places and destroyed the boycotted newspapers–Scene on Frankfort Street, near Newspaper Row,” Leslie’s Weekly, Aug. ![]() West Clinedinst, “The Hottest Strike of Midsummer. ![]()
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