Workers World, Vol. 12, No. 2, January 29, 1970
With the announcement of the arrest on January 21 of three men in Cleveland, Ohio, who were charged with the murder of Yablonski, the U.S. government has made clear that it intends to pursue the assassination of the mine workers’ leader in the pattern and the spirit of the Malcolm X assassination.
There too the government arrested, tried and subsequently convicted two men for the assassination of the militant Black leader. There too the killing was perpetrated in the course of a long and bitter factional dispute which threatened to break out into violence.
But as the world has learned since then, particularly in light of subsequent assassinations, the suspects convicted in the Malcolm X case were, at most, hired gunmen and that the real assassination was carried out by the U.S. government. The government was anxious to murder Malcolm X because he appeared to be a serious danger to them at a time when the Black masses were showing signs of impending struggles.
If Paul Gilly, Claude Vealey and Aubran Martin, the three men arrested in the Yablonski case, are tried and subsequently convicted, it will prove no more than that they are the hired gunmen in a conspiracy in which the government is the real culprit. It will have no more significance than the conviction of Earl Ray in the Martin Luther King case.
The sham concern and “speedy apprehension” shown by the FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police are calculated to bolster their image as protectors of the United Mine Workers interests, when their main purpose in reality is to cripple and dismember the organization.
It is to be noted that the first and real bit of evidence to emerge in the assassination, according to the January 25 issue of the New York Times, was not discovered by the FBI, nor the Pennsylvania State Police, nor the Cleveland authorities. The picture of frantic FBI and state authorities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky quickly coming up with evidence is a false one.
It is only Yablonski’s own circle of family and friends that came up with any clue at all, and that, according to the Times’ account, was a list of license numbers kept by Yablonski himself of “suspicious automobiles seen near his house.” It was on the basis of this list that the FBI presumably was put on the trail to Cleveland.
But all this does not answer the one key question in the assassination. Who hired the killers? Who are the real conspirators? The promises of the authorities to find the people who supplied the money for the so-called contract killing are not calculated to shed light on the assassination, but rather to reveal that portion of the evidence which will be sufficient to throw the onus on the union and leave the coal barons and the steel trusts, at whose behest the assassination was really carried out, scot free.
(The venal Boyle bureaucracy, whatever its share of the guilt, is not at all the target at which the government agents are aiming. The target is the union itself, comprised as it is of tens of thousands of tough, intractable mine workers who have fought the government before and are capable of doing it again.)
What is completely overlooked is the significance of the federal grand jury that is being summoned in Cleveland to look into the assassination. It now appears that this grand jury will also delve into what officials of the government have, according to the New York Times, described as “broadening aspects of the investigation.” It should also be noted that the jury will call persons not only from Ohio and Pennsylvania, but from “several other states.”
The ominous significance of this is bound to escape even an attentive reader who is vitally interested in union affairs. By the “broadening aspects of the investigation” stretching into many other states is really meant a full-fledged fishing expedition into the internal affairs of the United Mine Workers of America. This is a veiled threat not only to call every militant unionist in the UMW, but to compel them to reveal everything about the union that the coal barons and the government could publicly use as a battering ram to break up the union.
What the government wants in this case above everything else is not to cleanse the union of corruption, but to rid it of every spark of militancy.
By charging the three suspected killers with conspiracy, in which the FBI contends that the accused men had started to plan the murders in Cleveland last July 19, the FBI also intimates that it had clues dating back to that time. Now, according to press reports, the FBI seems to have obtained material from one of the suspected killers, who may have confessed. But it should be plain that the date of July 19 is something that the FBI had known about many, many weeks before the assassination of Yablonski.
It was in July, according to Yablonski’s attorney, Joseph Rauh, that he began filing the first of more than a hundred complaints with the Department of Labor which alleged not only fraud, but violence, intimidation and threats against Yablonski’s union collaborators.
Thus the cardinal element in this case is not the question of who pulled the trigger that killed the Yablonskis, but who are the men behind those who did. And the FBI and all the government agencies connected with what they call “law enforcement” had ample notice and knowledge of what was going on as long ago as the middle of last July.
Convening a grand jury, with broad powers to roam over many states and drag anybody and everybody from the UMW to give testimony, is not for the purpose of finding out anything about the assassination. The federal government knew all about it before it ever happened, and it is the primary culprit.
But a grand jury investigation is for the purpose of discrediting and disqualifying the whole union. As of now, it is leading up to the most massive sort of government intervention into a labor organization witnessed to date and has already completely paralyzed the functioning of the union.
Both factions within the union are at the complete mercy of the federal government. Both are now forced to work with the cops while the energies of the rank and file are being channeled in the wrong direction.
By inviting the government to take a hand in the investigation of the assassination, the Yablonski forces under the leadership of Rauh, who speaks for them as their attorney, have now become the captives of the government. They expect the government to do the job for them (presumably reviving the progressive traditions and practices of the union), a job which only the miners themselves can do – and have done magnificently in the past, not by dependence on the government, but in opposition to it.
In inviting government intervention, the Yablonski forces have gone “one better” than the Boyle forces, whom they accuse of collusion with the coal barons. But the representative of the coal barons is none other than the capitalist government that carried out the assassination in the first place.
The Yablonski assassination is the answer of the U.S. ruling class to the growing unrest in the ranks of American labor in the face of galloping inflation and its shrinking pay envelopes and mounting cost of living. It is meant as a warning to the labor hierarchy that dominates the trade union movement not to step out of line, not to transgress certain limits, and to maintain the artificial equilibrium that exists between capital and labor.
But the class struggle of the workers against intensified capitalist exploitation under the impetus of imperialist war is bound to come to the surface. The case-hardened trade union bureaucracy, which reigns over the multimillion-member labor movement, is stunned by the assassination and left literally speechless. Not one word has come out of them which would be of help either to the miners’ union or to their own organizations. They appear to be completely paralyzed.
This only means that the delayed reaction from the ranks of the workers will break out spontaneously, will sweep over the barriers of encrusted trade union officialdom, and will come crashing down on the heads of the bureaucracy to inaugurate a new era of working class struggle.
January 25, 1970
Last updated: 11 May 2026