What was daily activism across the country in the fight against evictions during the Great Depression.

‘Workers Fight Back Cops In Brooklyn Eviction Fight’ from The Daily Worker. Vol. 9 No. 128. May 30, 1932.

Police Swing; Clubs, Jail Two: Unemployed Council Leads Fight

NEW YORK. Viciously swinging clubs and blackjacks, a squad of over 50 police and detectives attacked a crowd of about 100 workers who had rallied Saturday night under the leadership of the unemployed Council at 1420 Forty-fourth St., in the Bedford Park section of Brooklyn, to put back into the house the furniture of Joseph Otto, an unemployed worker whom the Tammany marshal had evicted.

Police rained blows on the heads of men and women without discrimination. The workers fought back, defending themselves valiantly and despite the brutal and thuggish attack of the police succeeded in carrying some of the evicted workers’ furniture into the house.

Not satisfied breaking the heads of the workers, who have pledged to fight to an end all attempts on the part of the landlords to throw workers’ furniture into the streets, the police jailed Otto and Mrs. Mary Sinay. Otto is held in jail charged with disorderly conduct and Mrs. Sinay is charged with attempted felonious assault.

This is the second attempt on the part of the workers to return the furniture of Otto. He was evicted from his second floor apartment one day last week. The workers failed the first time because they were outnumbered by the police. On Saturday about a hundred workers marched from the headquarters of the Unemployed Council to the evicted workers home. At once six police squad cars armed with machine guns were rushed to the scene and the cops went pell-mell about clubbing and beating the workers.

The Unemployed Council calls on all workers of Brooklyn to rally in greater numbers to’ stop evictions, to protest the vicious clubbing tactics of the Tammany police and to demand the immediate unconditional release of the jailed workers.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1932/v09-n128-may-30-1932-DW-LOC.pdf