March 4, 1933: Communist Party’s Unemployed Councils Rally

March 4 1933, the Communist Party’s Unemployed Councils organized 10,000 workers to mass on San Francisco’s Civic Center to demand relief from new president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took office that day.

Decrying FDR’s “starvation program”, they demanded unemployment insurance as well as new trials for Tom Mooney (a labor leader wrongly imprisoned for a 1916 bombing) and the Scottsboro Boys (9 Black Alabama teenagers falsely indicted by an all-white jury for raping a white woman).

The San Francisco demonstration was joined by smaller marches in the greater Bay Area: some 500 marched in Watsonville, 300 in San Mateo, and 250 in Monterey.

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