Anna Lopizzo

Anna LoPizzo was a striker killed during the Lawrence Textile Strike (also known as the Bread and Roses Strike), considered one of the most significant struggles in U.S. labor history. Eugene Debs said of the strike, "The Victory at Lawrence was the most decisive and far-reaching ever won by organized labor." Author Peter Carlson saw this strike conducted by the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as a turning point. He wrote, "Wary of [a war with the anti-capitalist IWW], some mill owners swallowed their hatred of unions and actually invited the AFL to organize their workers.

Anna LoPizzo's death was significant to both sides in the struggle. Wrote Bruce Watson in his epic Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream, "If America had a Tomb of the Unknown Immigrant paying tribute to the millions of immigrants known only to God and distant cousins compiling family trees, Anna LoPizzo would be a prime candidate to lie in it."

Ardis Cameron describes the immigrant's world in which Anna LoPizzo lived:

Relying on old-world practices and principles of collectivity, the immigrant community routinely "swapped" names and falsified documents to evade "impossible" laws and ensure mutual survival...

Falsification of documents might serve a number of purposes — citizenship status, job experience, age requirements...

[In America immigrants often] took the name of the person who got [them] the job. To those who lived on Common Street [in Lawrence, Massachusetts], Anna LoPizzo, a slain mill worker during the strike of 1912, was Anna LaMonica, once too young to work.

Upon her death, Anna's adopted name was destined to become the name by which she would be known for all time.

Fred Thompson's book The I.W.W.: Its First Seventy Years states that,

On Jan. 29 a peaceful parade of the strikers was charged by the militia, and officer Oscar Benoit firing into the crowd, hit striker Anna Lo Pezza (sic), killing her.

In his autobiography Big Bill Haywood wrote that,

...nineteen witnesses had seen Policeman Benoit murder the girl.

In the book Roughneck, Peter Carlson has written,

At the barricades, pickets and police began to push and shove each other. The police advanced, packing the retreating marchers so tight that they could no longer move, and then began clubbing. Some strikers fought back. A policeman received a stab wound. A police sergeant ordered his men to draw their weapons and fire. Their shots killed a young Italian striker named Anna LoPizzo.

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Wikipedia