April

4 Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968 while helping striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn.

12 Florence Reece, active in Harlan County, Ky. coal strikes and author of the famous labor song "Which Side Are You On," was born in 1900.

14 In 1939, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published. The novel of social protest dramatized the story of "Okies" -- workers who migrated from Oklahoma's dust bowl to the groves of California -- and experienced tremendous hardships and exploitation along the way.

15 A. Phillip Randolph, an African-American and one of the most influential trade unionists in the U.S. labor movement, was born in 1889. The organizer and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an all-black union, Randolph said: "The essence of trade unionism is uplift. The labor movement traditionally has been the haven for the dispossessed, the despised, the neglected, the downtrodden, and the poor."

20 In 1914, company gunmen attacked a tent colony of striking miners and their families in Colorado, setting it ablaze and killing 26 men, women and children in what is remembered as the Ludlow Massacre.

27 James Oppenheim's poem, "Bread and Roses," was published in Industrial Solidarity in 1946. "Our lives shall not be sweated/from birth until life closes/hearts starve as well as bodies; give/ us bread, but give us roses," the poem reads. It was penned after Oppenheim saw a sign held by young mill girls picketing in the 1912 strike against woolen companies in Lawrence, Mass.