Twenty men were hanged in Pennsylvania on a single day. Most people have never heard of it. πΆ
On June 21, 1877, the state of Pennsylvania executed ten members of the Molly Maguires at the Carbon County Prison in Mauch Chunk and six more at the Schuylkill County Prison in Pottsville. Four additional men were hanged on separate dates that same year. It became known as Black Thursday, and it remains one of the largest mass executions in American history.
What's interesting is who was behind it. The prosecutions were driven almost entirely by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, hired by the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company. The key witness against the Mollies was James McParland, a Pinkerton operative who had spent years embedded in the organization. No physical evidence was presented at trial. The convictions rested almost entirely on the testimony of a paid informant working for the industry the Mollies had been fighting.
Here's where it gets complicated: some of the men hanged almost certainly committed the murders they were charged with. Others almost certainly did not. Pennsylvania executed them all the same. The coal companies got what they wanted: the labor resistance in the anthracite region was broken, and it would be decades before organized workers in Pennsylvania's coal fields found their footing again.
Did you know about Black Thursday? π―οΈ
#PennsylvaniaHistory #LaborHistory #MollyMaguires #RustBeltHistory #ForgottenPennsylvania
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