ATDDTA (8) What Joe Hill Calls Organize (216:38-39)

[Keith]

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill

Hill was executed by firing squad on November 19, 1915, and his last  
word was "Fire!" Just prior to his execution, he had written to Bill  
Haywood, an IWW leader, saying, "Don't waste any time in mourning.  
Organize."

Hill's body was sent to Chicago, where it was cremated. This was  
fitting, as he had joked that he would not be caught dead in Utah.  
His ashes were purportedly sent to every IWW local. In 1988 it was  
discovered that an envelope had been seized by the U. S. Postal  
Service in 1917 because of its "subversive potential". The envelope,  
with a photo affixed captioned, "Joe Hill murdered by the capitalist  
class, Nov. 19, 1915," as well as its contents, was deposited at the  
National Archives.

After some negotiations, the last of Hill's ashes (but not the  
envelope that contained them) was turned over to the IWW in 1988. The  
weekly In These Times ran notice of the ashes and invited readers to  
suggest what should be done with them. Suggestions varied from  
enshrining them at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC to  
Abbie Hoffman's suggestion that they be eaten by today's "Joe Hills"- 
like Billy Bragg and Michelle Shocked. Bragg indeed did swallow a  
small bit of the ashes and still carries Shocked's share for eventual  
completion of Hoffman's last prank. The majority of the ashes was  
cast to the wind in the US, Canada, Sweden, Australia, and Nicaragua.  
The ashes sent to Sweden were only partly cast to the wind. The main  
part was interred in the wall of a union office in Landskrona, a  
minor city in the south of the country, with a plaque commemorating  
Hill. That room is now the reading room of the local city library.

One small packet of ashes was scattered at a 1989 ceremony which  
unveiled a monument to IWW coal miners buried in Lafayette, Colorado.  
Six unarmed strikers were machine gunned by a Colorado state police  
force in 1927 in the (first) Columbine Massacre. Until 1989 the  
graves of five of these men were unmarked. Another famous Wobbly,  
Carlos Cortez, scattered Joe Hill's ashes on the graves at the  
commemoration.

Song: http://tinyurl.com/2abgg5