Kate O'Hare (1876 - 1948)
Sun Mar 26, 1876
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Kate Richards O'Hare, born on this day in 1876, was an American Socialist Party activist, editor, and orator who was imprisoned during World War I after giving an anti-war speech and worked with Emma Goldman on prison reform.
For giving an anti-war speech in Bowman, North Dakota, O'Hare was convicted and sent to prison by federal authorities for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, an act criminalizing interference with recruitment and enlistment of military personnel.
With no federal penitentiaries for women existing at the time, O'Hare was delivered to Missouri State Penitentiary on a five-year sentence in 1919, but was pardoned in 1920 after a nationwide campaign to secure her release. While incarcerated, O'Hare met the anarchists Emma Goldman and Gabriella Segata Antolini, working with them to improve prison conditions.
In April 1922, she joined a national march to release other activists also convicted of violating the 1917 Espionage Act. With support of the fledgling ACLU, women and children stood at the gates of the White House for almost two months before President Harding met with them.
Like some other white socialist contemporaries, such as Victor L. Berger, Kate O'Hare was a white supremacist and supporter of racial segregation. In a pamphlet whose title contained a racial slur, she wrote: "In Kansas City black men have replaced white men in the packinghouses wherever possible, and the white daughters of both Republican and Democratic voters are forced to associate with them in terms of shocking intimacy. In the coal mines of the whole United States black men have been used to replace white miners until there is not a shred of race distinction left."
"Thank God that at this hour I am dangerous to the war profiteers of this country who rob the people on the one hand, and rob and debase the government on the other; and then with their pockets and wallets stuffed with the filthy, bloodstained profits of war, wrap the sacred folds of the Stars and Stripes about them and [about] their blatant hypocrisy to the world."
- Kate O'Hare
- Date: 1876-03-26
- Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, historicmissourians.shsmo.org, www.jstor.org, blackagendareport.com.
- Tags: #Birthdays.
- Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org
