Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Abergen.

I'm recording this on Monday, June 1st, after a weekend of protest, anger, sadness, and violence

this country hasn't seen in a long, long time.

And I don't think I see it ending any time soon.

So we try and keep these shows pretty short,

but I just want to say a few words before we get to today's

episode, which is about a massive labor strike in 1952.

But if you listen to the first episode of this show,

you heard us talk about how both

Nicki and I feel like history has lots to teach us, but not in tidy ways. You can't always look to a historical

moment and say, this is just like that, and here are three quick lessons I've articulated

this before but I've really come to think of history as something you do a way to

ask questions about the past that lets us understand the present and in turn I've come to think of history not as cyclical but as cumulative

The tumult we're feeling and living in right now is a product of the past, not a repetition of it. And it's a product of a

ton of forces, elections, societal changes, racism, economic divides. That said,

it needs to be said, this weekend's protests were in response to a very specific thing as well, police brutality against black Americans.

So since we're in the habit of listing past moments on this show, I'll just acknowledge the long history of

protests against police brutality. Here's an incomplete list

1943 in Harlem 1965 in Watts, 1967 Newark, 1980, Miami, 1992, Los Angeles, 2014, Ferguson, 2015 Baltimore,

and now 2020 everywhere. We could have a hundred episodes of this

podcast starting on different days that speak to this moment because the struggle

...