Some wounds take longer to heal than others. One hundred years ago this week 11 children and two women died at Ludlow, a tent colony of workers striking against the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The Colorado Coal War also took countless more victims — striking miners, union busters hired by the Rockefellers and national militia dispatched by a Governor on behalf of the world's richest family. ​

 

The Colorado Independent is marking the anniversary with a multimedia series about the scabs left a century after the Ludlow Massacre.

 

On Thursday April 10, the Independent sponsored a forum of people whose lives, rather directly or indirectly, have been shaped by the events at Ludlow. They include: Bob Butero, Region 4 director of the United Mine Workers Union and a third-generation Colorado miner; Frank and Mary Petrucci, the son of a striker at Ludlow and his daughter, named after her grandmother who survived the massacre; Dave Mason, Colorado's poet laureate, professor at Colorado College and author of a verse novel called Ludlow; Wil Smith, an employment attorney in Boulder who speaks about where we as workers and Coloradans stand a century after the tragic massacre; Monica Martinez-Vargas, a retired janitor, lead organizer in Justice for Janitors and longtime member of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union); Lauren Martens, executive director of SEIU’s Colorado State Council, will be interpreting from Spanish for Monica.