September
8, 1973 – Led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, more than 8,000
people march through the Loop from a starting point at State Street and Wacker
Drive, headed for a rally in Grant Park.
A spokesman for the Coalition for Jobs and Economic Justice, the sponsor
of the march, says, “We are facing a crisis of everyday living. It is the story of the jobless at the
employment gate. It’s 40 million school children facing the loss of milk. It’s the crisis of the welfare mother trying
to fend off malnutrition at supermarket prices, the closed down factory, the
bus line that died.” [Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1973] Jack
Edward, the Vice-President of the United Auto Workers says at the Grant Park
rally, “In 1963 we had a friendly wind at our backs—John F. Kennedy. Now we
have adversity at our faces—Richard M. Nixon, whose interest in economic and
social justice was clearly demonstrated by his veto this week of a bill that
would have raised the minimum wage in steps to $2.20 an hour and extended the
protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act to about 7 million workers.” Organizers had predicted a turn-out of 50,000
protestors, an estimate that was clearly optimistic. As the above photo shows Reverend Jackson is still at it in 1975 as he leads a rally in favor of the Humphrey-Hawkins act that advocated using government-paid positions to combat the ravages of inflation and unemployment.
September 8, 1860 – The schooner Augusta sails into Chicago, reporting that sometime during the night she had collided with the Lady Elgin on the lake. The Lady Elgin, with somewhere between 400 and 700 passengers aboard, most of them members of Milwaukee’s Irish Union Guard, is holed below the waterline when the Augusta strikes her amidships in the midst of a lake squall, and within 20 minutes she sinks. No one will ever know how many drown in the lake off Winnetka or die on the rocks just off shore. Bodies continue to wash ashore well into December, some of them almost 80 miles from the wreck. Many of those aboard the Lady Elgin are never found. Those who could be identified are returned to Milwaukee for burial, but a number of the unfortunate souls onboard the ship are buried in a mass grave In Highwood, not far from the Port Clinton lighthouse, a place that has since been lost to time.
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