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7 unusual facts about Knights of Labor


Albert G. Porter

Because he had supported the strikers in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, he was able to gain the endorsement of the Knights of Labor, who turned out a large labor vote in his favor.

Alzina Stevens

She became active in the trade unions, notably as one of the leaders of the Knights of Labor in Chicago.

Briceville, Tennessee

Merrell, a French-born Knights of Labor activist, had been chased out of mining towns in Indiana before settling in Briceville, where he was blacklisted for Union activities in 1889, and made his living operating a mercantile store.

James Otis Sargent Huntington

He was later a founder of the Church Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Labor, and was an early member of the Knights of Labor.

Olivier-David Benoît

Benoît had his early trade union experience with an American-based group called the Knights of Labor.

Omaha Platform

The planks themselves represent the merger of the agrarian concerns of the Farmers' Alliance with the free-currency monetarism of the Greenback Party while explicitly endorsing the goals of the largely urban Knights of Labor.

Peter Richard Kenrick

During the period when the Knights of Labor, a strongly Roman Catholic labor union and the first national labor union, turned to violence, Kenrick vocally opposed them and condemned their actions.


Coal Creek War

That night about 300 armed miners— probably led by Knights of Labor organizers Eugene Merrell, George Irish, and Marcena Ingraham— surrounded the Briceville stockade.

Cottondale, Alabama

Cottondale was the site of cotton mills where the Knights of Labor had some success in organizing drives in the late 1880s; and where "Mother" Jones worked in 1904 while studying conditions for working women and children in the South.

Rudolf Rocker

The Commissioner-General of Immigration, the former Knights of Labor President Terence V. Powderly, advised the couple to get married to settle the matter, but they refused and were deported back to England on the same ship they had arrived on.

Wyndham Mortimer

Wyndham Mortimer was born March 11, 1884 in Karthaus, Pennsylvania, the son of a coal miner who was a member of the Knights of Labor, an early American labor union.


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