2025
Installation comprising: 1200 hand stamped brass miners’ tags affixed to miners helmet, massacre site photograph with mourning cloth, archival images, commemorative plates using archaeological plate shards, gold foilings of archaeological objects, objects of rememberance.

THE WHITE CITY // Massacre in the Colorado Coalfields

One of the most violent strikes in American labor history unfolded between 1913 and 1914 in the coal mines of Colorado—a state-sanctioned mass killing of striking workers. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) helped initiate the general strike in Ludlow, Colorado, halting labor in protest of dangerous and poor working conditions. For 14 months, 1,200 striking miners and their families—comprising about 32 different racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups—occupied a white canvas tent colony on the prairie.

Mogul John D. Rockefeller was a part-owner of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which employed the striking miners. At his behest, the National Guard arrived to break the strike alongside company-supported militia groups. During the strikers’ Greek Orthodox Easter celebration, these forces opened fire on the tent camps, engulfing them in flames. While casualty figures vary, it is believed there were 25 fatalities in total, including 12 children.

This massacre was largely forgotten—or rather, omitted from collective and public memory. A young socialist historian, Howard Zinn, wrote his master’s thesis on Ludlow only after hearing it referenced in the 1946 Woody Guthrie song “The Ludlow Massacre.” Zinn described Ludlow as “the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history.”