Labor Day

Latina labor leader, Emma Tenayuca, led a major food-industry strike in her early 20s and was eventually ostracized for her political beliefs.

The brains behind the political slogan “Yes we can!”, Mexican-American labor leader Dolores Huerta fought for the rights of immigrant workers in the 1960s.

Civil rights activist Dorothy Bolden made it her mission to empower America’s working class. Her activism empowered domestic workers across the nation – and created noticeable change in the workplace for thousands of Black women.

Harlan County coal miners in the 1930s went on a labour strike protesting about the conditions. Coal companies and the local police forces put them under. It broke out into civil unrest and Unions were established.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Tragedy took the lives of 146 workers – and exposed a shocking lack of workplace health and safety laws in New York State.

In the early 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt's progressive legislation, dubbed the Square Deal, aimed to limit the power of corporations, protect consumers, and conserve natural resources. The Square Deal drastically changed the United States – and still impacts our lives today.

For centuries, women have used activism in the United States to voice their concerns about society and secure their rights as citizens. Activism is an important part of any democracy as it’s the way ordinary people shape nations.

The Great Depression was one of the worst economic disasters America has ever experienced. But it’s also a period that produced some of the great innovations in US history.

As the Great Depression worsened in the 1930s, thousands of Americans lost their jobs and eventually their homes. Shantytowns dubbed “Hoovervilles” named after unsympathetic President Herbert Hoover, spread across the U.S.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was the biggest protest America had ever seen. It culminated in Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic “I Have A Dream” speech. But the man who made it all possible, chief organiser Bayard Rustin, was almost written out of history not because he was black, but because he was gay.