On this day, 19 October 1920, Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested and charged under Regulation 42 of the Defence of the Realm Act with attempting to cause sedition in the navy by editing and publishing two articles in the October 16 issue of the newspaper ‘The Workers’ Dreadnought’ — 'Discontent on the Lower Deck’. They were based on a letter from a young Navy rating called Springhill and published under the pseudonym S.000 (Gunner), and an article on racism entitled 'The Yellow Peril and the Dockers’, written by Claude McKay under the pseudonym Leon Lopez. Pankhurst was also a leading light of the Hands Off Russia! campaign, and the article 'The Yellow Peril and the Dockers’ urged workers not to load ships supplying arms to anti-communist forces. It was published just a few months after the successful boycott of SS Jolly George, a ship carrying arms to be used to fight against the Russian revolution. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2113836525468153/?type=3
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On this day, 6 September 1971, over 100 prisoners escaped from the Punta Carretas prison in Montevideo, Uruguay, most of them members of the Tupamaros left-wing guerrilla group. A riot started nearby as a diversion, helping 106 guerrillas and five other prisoners to escape through a 40-foot tunnel which had been dug from a house across the street into one of the prison cells.
While digging the tunnel, the rebels found a previous, spacious tunnel which had been dug by the anarchist Gino Gatti for a previous mass escape of political prisoners forty years prior.
One escapee later recalled: “We had all assumed that this tunnel, when it was discovered, had to be carefully sealed off. Now, however, we have come to see that in 1931, the repression was limited to bricking up the two entrances with concrete and filling in the rest with sand… We had made a historic find. We were in a museum. And we could not tell the world about it. When we cleared the sand from that warm tunnel, we could see in its vaults and on its walls, clear, the still-fresh traces of their tools. They seemed to speak. Transmitting to those of us who could have been their grandchildren, a fraternal message: us too, brothers, us too… One could tell, on those walls polished by the work of time, solidarity and patience, the anarchist picks, one by one… The eternal struggle for freedom, the same struggle, the stubborn and courageous language of the oppressed of yesterday and today crossed by destiny’s mandate there, under the concrete, at the exit of a prison. … They, the comrades of ‘31, came from the toilet next to the blacksmith’s shop. We, those of '71, came from the cells. That’s why their oblique path crossed ours”.
The prisoners then used the old tunnel to store earth and tools for the new. On the night of the escape, the Tupamaros left a small sigh at the junction of the tunnels: “Here two generations, two ideologies and the same destiny cross: freedom”.
Pic: escapee Raul Sendio https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2076113322573807/?type=3