Free speech fights are conflicts over the right to speak freely, particularly involving the Industrial Workers of the World (the "IWW", or "Wobblies'") efforts in the early twentieth century to organize workers and publicly speak about labor issues. Wobblies, Single Taxers, and other radicals of the time were actively engaged in organizing workers and others, and their efforts were often opposed, and sometimes met with violent repression by local government and business authorities. The most notorious of these conflicts was the "San Diego Free Speech Fight", which brought the IWW to the greater notice of the American public and was notable for the intensity of violence by anti-labor vigilantes directed at the IWW; this violence included the kidnapping and tarring and feathering of Ben Reitman, who was a physician, and was Emma Goldman's lover.
More generally, a free speech fight is any incident in which a group is involved in a conflict over its speech. For instance, the Free Speech Movement, which began with a conflict on the Berkeley Campus in California in the 1960s, was a "free speech fight".
Read more about Free Speech Fights: "Free Speech Fights" and The IWW
Famous quotes containing the words free, speech and/or fights:
“Women born at the turn of the century have been conditioned not to speak openly of their wedding nights. Of other nights in bed with other men they speak not at all. Today a woman having bedded with a great general feels free to tell us that in bed the general could not present arms. Women of my generation would have spared the great general the revelation of this failure.”
—Jessamyn West (1907–1984)
“There is the old brute, too, the savage, the hairy man who dabbles his fingers in ropes of entrails; and gobbles and belches; whose speech is guttural, visceral—well, he is here. He squats in me.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Kids win this’n’that every day. Thousands of them. One out of a hundred fights professionally. One out of a thousand’s worth watchin’, one out of a million’s worth coffee and doughnuts.”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)