"So May 4th in the labor movement has always been an important date"
About this Quote
May 4th isn’t a sentimental anniversary in labor history; it’s a coded signal, a reminder that the fight for worker power has always been entangled with state violence and public amnesia. When William Kunstler flags the date as “always” important, he’s not offering a calendar note. He’s invoking Haymarket: May 4, 1886, when a labor rally in Chicago ended in a bombing, a police crackdown, and the execution of anarchists on evidence so thin it became a global shorthand for judicial vengeance. That origin story is why much of the world marks May Day on May 1, while the United States quarantined the holiday and later rebranded “Labor Day” into a safer, less radical ritual.
Kunstler, the era’s most recognizable movement lawyer, understood how memory works in politics: power doesn’t just suppress organizations; it rewrites the commemorations that keep them coherent. His phrasing is deliberately plain, almost pedestrian, because the subtext is volatile. “The labor movement” is doing double duty here, meaning both unions and the broader ecosystem of dissent he spent his career defending. “Always” pushes back against the American habit of treating labor struggle as a sepia-toned chapter, not a living conflict.
He’s also gesturing at a strategic lesson. May 4th is useful precisely because it’s contested. It forces a choice: remember workers as citizens who built the economy, or remember them as a threat that needed to be policed. Kunstler’s intent is to keep that tension visible, so solidarity doesn’t dissolve into nostalgia.
Kunstler, the era’s most recognizable movement lawyer, understood how memory works in politics: power doesn’t just suppress organizations; it rewrites the commemorations that keep them coherent. His phrasing is deliberately plain, almost pedestrian, because the subtext is volatile. “The labor movement” is doing double duty here, meaning both unions and the broader ecosystem of dissent he spent his career defending. “Always” pushes back against the American habit of treating labor struggle as a sepia-toned chapter, not a living conflict.
He’s also gesturing at a strategic lesson. May 4th is useful precisely because it’s contested. It forces a choice: remember workers as citizens who built the economy, or remember them as a threat that needed to be policed. Kunstler’s intent is to keep that tension visible, so solidarity doesn’t dissolve into nostalgia.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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