People Can Make a Difference, If they Come Together

Here is a story that I think anyone who is interested in politics shoud know about.

from Wikipedia:

Newspaper boys, also called newsboys or newsies, were the main distributors of newspapers to the general public from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s in the United States of America. Standing on street corners, walking through neighborhoods and hawking their papers throughout every city, they first appeared with the rise of mass circulation newspapers. Newsboys tended to be among the poorest classes of society, often seen sleeping on the streets. They typically earned around 30 cents a day and often worked until very late at night.[3] Cries of “Extra, extra!” were often heard into the morning hours as newsboys were forced to hawk every last, or extra, paper.[4]

Throughout their history, newsboys were not often well received. In 1875 a popular writer of the period wrote, “There are 10,000 children living on the streets of New York….The newsboys constitute an important division of this army of homeless children. You see them everywhere…. They rend the air and deafen you with their shrill cries. They surround you on the sidewalk and almost force you to buy their papers. They are ragged and dirty. Some have no coats, no shoes and no hat.” Therefore the common ill-treatment of the newsboys by their employers was not regarded by much of society.[5] The impact of a ten-cent cost hike on the newsboys’ families and living situations were rarely, if ever, reported.

In 1899, a large number of New York City newsboys refused to distribute the papers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, after the cost of distributing papers was raised a 1/10 cent. The strikers demonstrated across the Brooklyn Bridge for days, effectively bringing traffic to a standstill[6], along with the news distribution for most New England cities. Several rallies drew more than 5,000 newsboys, complete with charismatic speeches by strike leader Kid Blink.[7]

So named because he was reportedly blind in one eye, Kid Blink was popular with competing newspapers such as the New York Tribune, who often patronizingly quoted Blink with his dialect intact, attributing to him such sayings as “Me men is nobul” and “Dis is de time when we’se got to stick together like glue.” Blink and his strikers were the subject of violence, as well. Hearst and Pulitzer hired men to break up rallies and protect the newspaper deliveries still underway.[8] During one rally Blink told strikers, “Friens and feller workers. Dis is a time which tries de hearts of men. Dis is de time when we’se got to stick together like glue…. We know wot we wants and we’ll git it even if we is blind.”[9]

The strike ended upon the newspapers’ agreement to buy back all the papers the boys had refused to sell, and the union disbanded. Some decades later, the introduction of urban child-welfare practices led to improvements in the newsboys’ quality of life.