Summit County Labor News (Akron, Ohio)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
865 issues from 1944 to 1960, published in Akron, Ohio, digitised for Chronicling America.
This newspaper was a weekly four-page pro-labor publication serving Akron, Ohio, and surrounding communities from 1923 to 1976. As a member of the International Labor Press of America, it reported on “news of interest from the various local unions” and described itself as a “Non-Partisan Newspaper published in the best interests of Organized Labor and the entire Community.”
Throughout the run of the Summit County Labor News, Akron was known as the “Rubber Capital of the World” due to its concentration of tire and rubber manufacturers, namely Goodyear, Firestone, and B.F. Goodrich. While the Labor News dealt in all labor-related topics, ranging from local to international, Akron’s rubber industry and its workers often took a prominent place in the paper’s pages. That coverage spanned decades of the twentieth century marked by World War II, recurrent disputes between labor and capital, and some of the peaks of Akron as an industrial center.
By 1933, Alex Eigenmacht, a Hungarian American immigrant and printer, was working as the Labor News’s publisher. The noted Ohio journalist and author Ruth McKenney credited Eigenmacht with introducing the concept of sit-down strikes to Akron rubber workers in 1936, though this story is perhaps apocryphal. Wilmer Tate, a fervent local labor activist and organizer, served as the paper’s editor. By the early 1940s, however, Eigenmacht was acting in both capacities, which he continued to do until the late 1950s, when operations were passed…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Akron, Ohio, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress