Covington Hall gives details of the so-called ‘Grabow Riot’ when gun thugs attacked striking Brotherhood of Timbers Workers marchers on July 7, 1912 near Grabow, Louisiana. The workers defended themselves, setting the stage for imprisonment and trial for many B.T.W. members. Three fellow workers Asbury Decatur (“Kate”) Hall, J. Tooley, and Ed Brown were killed, as was a gun thug. Fifty were wounded and dozens arrested. A major event in the southern class war of the times, the interracial Brotherhood were not stopped, and continued their dogged struggle in the harshest of conditions, achieving modest successes over the following years.

‘Lawless Louisiana’ by Covington Hall from Industrial Worker. Vol. 4 No. 18. July 25, 1912. 

EYE WITNESS TELLS STORY OF MURDERS–MEN SHOT FROM OFFICE OF LUMBER LORD–GENERAL WALK OUT EXPECTED.

I have just received a letter from a friend in De Ridder, La., from which I quote the following:

“I would have written you before this but I have been busy and i have been scared, for I heard the ‘blue whistlers’ ring last Sunday, though I was not hit. They have Emerson and everybody else in jail but me. Emerson was speaking and they shot into us from Galloway’s office. They fired about two hundred shots at us but never touched Emerson or me, though I was standing about twenty steps from the office. They killed three and wounded about fifteen. Two union men, Decatur Hall and Uriah Martin, and one scab gunman from Texas named Vincent, were killed. They were shooting our boys to beat six bits till the gunman fell, then they went up in the air and quit.”

Since this was written, however, press reports state that beside the three men killed outright, six or seven men were desperately and thirty odd were more or less seriously wounded. Some of the wounded are not, at this writing, expected to live. In the dead and wounded, this is the result of the “riot” (?) that occurred at Grabow, La., Sunday evening, July 7th, 1912.

Immediately following the “riot” President A.L. Emerson of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers and eight or ten other members were arrested, denied ball and placed in the parish prison at Lake Charles, as was John Galloway, one of the proprietors of the Galloway Lumber Co., who is accused of having shot Decatur Hall as Hall was running away from the scene of action, and several of his followers.

After President Emerson was placed under arrest, when he was approached by reporters for an interview, he was told by the authorities that he “could not talk for publication.” Every day since the “riot” occurred union men have been placed under arrest. Among the last batch taken being Comrade John Helton, secretary of Local De Ridder, Socialist party, and the arrests still go on, the idea seeming to be to corral all the “leaders” and thus prevent a general walk-out of the peons from the mills and camps of the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association, which association has taken over the functions of the States of Louisiana and Texas in the timber belt and proclaimed martial law, brazenly declaring that its peons have “no grounds for protest” and boasting its intention to shoot ALL union labor out of the lumber industry.

All the news and evidence gathered since the “riot” goes to prove that the union men were expecting no trouble of the kind, else so many of them would not have been killed and wounded; that the unionists were ambushed and fired upon by men hidden in the office of the Galloway Lumber Co., while there are strong grounds for believing that the “riot” had been deliberately staged by the Lumber Trust for the purpose of creating a reign of terror in order to frighten its workers back into submission. There is also strong ground for believing that among the men hidden in the office of the Galloway Lumber Co., from which place the first shots came, were many gunmen who had been sent over from other association towns. As to the cause of the “riot,” it was but the climax to a long series of outrages that have been committed by the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association against union men and all suspected of sympathizing with them, brutalities of which the following reported in the New Orleans Item of July 12th, is a mild example. Says the Item: “Guards employed by the King-Ryder Company in Bonami, which is one of the 12 subsidiary concerns of the Long-Bell Lumber Company of Kansas City, Mo., Wednesday, were so zealous in working for the interest of their employers and against unionism that they almost drowned John McWilliams, a bakery wagon driver. McWilliams, who is more than 60 years old, has delivered bread in Monami for the City Bakery of De Ridder for many years.

Delivered Literature with Bread

“The deputies employed by the King-Ryder mill suspected McWilliams of distributing unionistic doctrine with his loaves. They seized him Wednesday morning, led him and his wagon just outside the fence which surrounds the camp and prevents union men and non-union men alike from entering or leaving the grounds without permission and gave him the ‘water cure.’ While two guards held the man another held a stream of water from a fire hose against him. He gasped and choked and only when it was seen he could no longer breathe did they turn the water off and let him go. According to McWilliams and members of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, he has no connection with the union and never had. The whole town of De Ridder is wrought up over the incident.”

Also the right of free speech, assembly and organization, except in union towns, has been suspended throughout Western Louisiana and Eastern Texas. In not a single association town is a man’s life or person safe, as witness the assault on H.G. Creel of the Rip-Saw at Oakdale, La., by thugs of the Industrial Lumber Co.

And these “deputies,” let the workingmen of the north and west remember, every last one of them have been commissioned by the Democratic party to beat, water-cure, shoot-up and murder workingmen whose only crime is that they have dared to organize and demand of the Lumber Trust a living wage.

The Industrial Union Bulletin, and the Industrial Worker were newspapers published by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1907 until 1913. First printed in Joliet, Illinois, IUB incorporated The Voice of Labor, the newspaper of the American Labor Union which had joined the IWW, and another IWW affiliate, International Metal Worker.The Trautmann-DeLeon faction issued its weekly from March 1907. Soon after, De Leon would be expelled and Trautmann would continue IUB until March 1909. It was edited by A. S. Edwards. 1909, production moved to Spokane, Washington and became The Industrial Worker, “the voice of revolutionary industrial unionism.”

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iw/v4n17-w173-jul-18-1912-IW.pdf