AP United States History - Mr. Johnson's Class, AM Floater Period

The Haymarket Square Affair

May 4: The crowd of 2500 were addressed by prominent labor leaders who urged them to take radical, violent action.
"Your masters have perceived your discontent.
      They do not like discontented slaves.
      They want to make you contented at all hazards, and if you are stubborn they will force or kill you.
      Look at the killing of your brothers at McCormick's yesterday. What did they do? The police tell you that they were a most dangerous crowd, armed to their teeth. The fact is, they, like ignorant children, indulged in the harmless sport of bombarding McCormick's slaughter house with stones. They paid the penalty of this folly with their blood. 
       The lesson I draw from this occurrence is, that working men must arm themselves for defense, so that they may be able to cope with the government hirelings of their masters."
--- The speech delivered by August Spies at Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886.
 At 10 PM, when anarchist Samuel Fielden was passionately addressing the crowd, a policeman reported that Fielden was using inflammatory language. 
"There is no security for the working classes under the present social system. A few individuals control the means of living, and hold the workingmen in a vise… You have nothing more to do with the law except to lay hands on it and throttle it until it makes its last kick. It turns your brothers out on the wayside and has degraded them until they have lost the last vestige of humanity… Keep your eye upon it, throttle it, kill it, stab it, do everything you can to wound it - to impede its progress."
--- Speech by Samuel Fielden at Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886.
Under the command of Inspector John Bonfield, 170 armed policemen attacked and tried to disperse the crowd, intruding on their rights of freedom of speech and peaceable assembly.
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Acrylic print of the police approaching the crowd at Haymarket Square and commanding them to disperse.
An unknown individual threw a bomb into the ranks of the police, killing Officer Mathias Degan. In the panic, the police blindly opened fire, killing 7 policemen and 4 workers.
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Engraving of Patrolman Mathias J. Degan, who was killed by the bomb.
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Depiction of the riot in Haymarket Square when the bomb went off.
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The Anarchist Riot in Chicago: a Dynamite Bomb Exploding Among the Police, from "Harper's Weekly." Depicts Samuel Fielden shouting from the back of a wagon while chaos ensues. Drawn by T. de Thulstrup from sketches by H. Jeanneret.