Nov. 14
100 Years ago – 1924
This announcement was in the Nov. 14, 1924 Henry Bulletin: “On Thursday evening 20th Martinsville will witness the biggest of all demonstrations ever made on the part of the local Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Delegations numbering up in the hundreds from Leaksville, Spray, Danville, Rocky Mount, Stuart and elsewhere will swell the more than 300 Klansmen in Martinsville, and put on a public initiation at the Gates farm at a convenient place just at the foot of Mulberry Street. An Immense Cross thirty feet high will be lighted giving the public an opportunity to see the services distinctly a mile away. The visiting Klansmen will parade through the business section of the city, out Church street down Starling to the place of meeting. This is your opportunity to look in on the Klansmen for the first time as they add new members to the Invisible Empire. The public will be asked to observe all signs posted by the Klansmen, and aid them in pulling off the parade and the ceremony in an orderly manner.”
75 years ago – 1949
Looking at history from the national perspective: The Red Scare was a nationwide paranoia over a perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the U.S., which intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The House Un-American Activities Committee, and also U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, investigated allegations of subversive elements among entertainers and in the government. How would this atmosphere play out in Martinsville? We’ve already seen it in June 1949, affecting the Martinsville Seven. Both the NAACP and the Congress of Civil Rights were having attorneys look into the cases of the Martinsville Seven to advocate for those men. However, an unnamed NAACP spokesperson said that the NAACP would not enter the cases with the Congress of Civil Rights or “any other organization bearing the Communist label. … We are having no part with the Communists. If the Communist organizations intend to press their intervention to the point where we would be involved, we will step out,” the Martinsville Bulletin reported on June 20, 1949. Now, back to November 1949: The United Furniture Workers of America was now under investigation by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for being Communist. The previous weekend, the CIO had just expelled the United Electrical Workers and United Farm Equipment Workers, which had 470,000 workers, for the same reason. Along with the Furniture Workers, it also was investigating the Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers union. The Associated Press had reported that the CIP had already fingered about 11 unions as being leftist, while suspicious of the Furniture Workers as being “the uncertain 12th.”
1960
The seventh-grade class of Joseph Martin Elementary School left at 7:15 a.m. for its annual trip to historic Richmond, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Jamestown Festival Park and Jamestown Island. The class normally took the trip in March, but the previous year’s class had been snowed it out there for a few days.
50 years ago – 1974
The Martinsville Tobacco Market closed for the season, after total sales of almost $9 million.
25 years ago - 1999
Joy Shumate and Cathy Spencer were recognized as Rives S. Brown Salespeople of the Month for October 1999.
— Information from museum records and the Henry Bulletin and the Martinsville Bulletin.