Free speech fights are conflicts over the right to speak freely, particularly involving the Industrial Workers of the World (the "IWW", or "Wobblies'") efforts in the early twentieth century to organize workers and publicly speak about labor issues. Wobblies, Single Taxers, and other radicals of the time were actively engaged in organizing workers and others, and their efforts were often opposed, and sometimes met with violent repression by local government and business authorities. The most notorious of these conflicts was the "San Diego Free Speech Fight", which brought the IWW to the greater notice of the American public and was notable for the intensity of violence by anti-labor vigilantes directed at the IWW; this violence included the kidnapping and tarring and feathering of Ben Reitman, who was a physician, and was Emma Goldman's lover.
More generally, a free speech fight is any incident in which a group is involved in a conflict over its speech. For instance, the Free Speech Movement, which began with a conflict on the Berkeley Campus in California in the 1960s, was a "free speech fight".
Read more about Free Speech Fights: "Free Speech Fights" and The IWW
Other articles related to "free speech fights, free speech, fight, speech, free":
... struggles for civil and constitutional rights, the IWW's free speech fights were carried out for more concrete goals ... The workers and the IWW had a common enemy in the communities that became free speech battlegrounds ... The attitude in some communities toward IWW members engaging in the fight for free speech is nicely characterized by an editorial in the San Diego Tribune on March 4, 1912 The strategy of ...
... robbed by the capitalist system! Fellow workers...’ He then launched into a short speech, and the makeshift band stepped out of the doorway and played their songs." ...
1918, a party called the Freier Ausschuss für einen deutschen Arbeiterfrieden ("Free Committee for a German Workers' Peace") was created in Bremen, Germany ... "national community" must be judenfrei ("free of Jews") ... Hitler's first speech was held in the Hofbräukeller, where he spoke in front of 111 people as the second speaker of the evening ...
Famous quotes containing the words fights, free and/or speech:
“Kids win this’n’that every day. Thousands of them. One out of a hundred fights professionally. One out of a thousand’s worth watchin’, one out of a million’s worth coffee and doughnuts.”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)
“Have you ever been up in your plane at night, alone, somewhere, 20,000 feet above the ocean?... Did you ever hear music up there?... It’s the music a man’s spirit sings to his heart, when the earth’s far away and there isn’t any more fear. It’s the high, fine, beautiful sound of an earth-bound creature who grew wings and flew up high and looked straight into the face of the future. And caught, just for an instant, the unbelievable vision of a free man in a free world.”
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“When toddlers are unable to speak about urgent matters, they must resort to crying or screaming. This happens even with adults. The voice is the carrier of emotion, and when speech fails us, we need to cry out in whatever form we can to convey our meaning. Often, what passes for negativism is really the toddler’s desperate effort to make herself understood.”
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)