The Preacher and the Slave (cover) - Pie in the Sky - by Joe Hill
Channel: Music for system change
Date: 2023-01-04

One hundred seven years ago today, the labor troubadour Joe Hill was executed by a Utah firing squad for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit. His real crime: singing and agitating on behalf of the working class.

At 7:00 a.m. on November 19, 1915, they shot Joe Hill, strapped to a chair, a target placed on his heart. Five sheriff’s deputies armed with rifles, four with live ammunition, one with blanks, stood ready.

“Aim” said the sheriff.

“Yes, aim,” said Hill.

Then it was over. Joe Hill — the Wobbly composer of revolutionary songs, the writer of revolutionary poems, an organizer on the docks of San Pedro, just thirty-six years old — was gone.

Joe Hill to some, Joe Hillstrom to others, was murdered that morning in Salt Lake City, a victim of Utah’s authorities — or was it the copper bosses?

The movement to spare Joe Hill had been massive. Millions of workers spoke out demanding that he not be killed. Few, save the bosses themselves, could believe that Hill had shot the grocer John G. Morrison and his son Arling. Even the American Federation of Labor appealed on Hill’s behalf at its 1915 convention in San Francisco. Its president, Samuel Gompers, intensely hostile to the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), wired President Woodrow Wilson urging him to intervene; Wilson in turn appealed to William Spry, the governor of Utah. To no effect — the copper bosses would have their way.


More about Joe Hill :
from : jacobin.com/2022/11/joe-hill-execution-anniversary-iww-labor-music-cartoons)