Disgruntled workers in the industrial rail hub…
July 1877 CE
Disgruntled workers in the industrial rail hub of East St. Louis, Missouri, had halted all freight traffic on July 21, with the city remaining in the control of the strikers for almost a week.
In response, the St. Louis Workingman's Party leads a group of approximately five hundred people across the Missouri River in an act of solidarity with the nearly one thousand workers on strike.
That act transforms an initial strike among railroad workers into a strike by thousands of workers in several industries for the eight-hour day and a ban on child labor, the first general strike in the United States.
The strike on both sides of the river is ended when some three thousand federal troops and five thousand deputized special police kill at least eighteen people in skirmishes around the city.
On July 28, 1877, they take control of the Relay Depot, the Commune's command center, and arrest some seventy strikers.
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