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On September 10, 1897, Luzerne County Sheriff James Martin and 150 armed deputies fired on approximately 400 unarmed immigrant coal miners marching peacefully to support a newly formed United Mine Workers union at Lattimer, Pennsylvania. At least 19 miners, mostly Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, and German, were killed-many shot in the back. Sheriff Martin and 73 deputies were arrested and tried for murder. Despite medical evidence of miners shot in the back and witness testimony contradicting the deputies' claim of self-defense, all defendants were acquitted. The massacre became a turning point for the UMW, resulting in over 10,000 new members.
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Like some of the Lattimer victims, Edward Pinkowski's father was a Polish immigrant. His father, who had come from the Russian-dominated side of Poland some years before to escape persecution, got him a job as a slate picker in Midvalley, a mine patch of red-painted company houses near Mount Carmel. Soon afterwards, he went inside the mines. He tried other work for a while in Massachusetts, where the author was born in 1916, but the call of the mine whistle was much more effective than paper mills and lumber yards. He returned to his old haunts, and his wife and two children followed after him.After graduating from Mount Carmel High School in 1936, Edward Pinkowski turned out a steady stream of essays, articles, and book reviews. One of his first articles, which was published in a national magazine, dealt with the Slavic people of the anthracite region, but it did not refer to the Lattimer Massacre. For all the author knew about the killing ofimmigrants in 1897 was slight.When he got out of the Navy, Ed found more about it in old newspaper files. Upon further search, he found that no book had ever been written on it. It made his blood boil to know that people of his race were forgotten for shedding their blood for the cause of unionism. Hedropped other work to unfold one of the worst deeds ever committed against the Slavic people who came to this country.
