Chiquola_Mill_Massacre

The Chiquola Mill Massacre, also known locally as Bloody Thursday, was the violent dispersal of a picket line of striking workers outside the Chiquola textile mill in Honea Path, South Carolina. The strike was part of the textile workers' strike of 1934, which mobilized workers up and down the East Coast of the United States in response to the worsening labor conditions during the Great Depression.
Violence broke out when Dan Beacham, the mayor and magistrate in Honea Path as well as the superintendent of the mill, ordered an armed posse of strikebreakers to fire into the crowd. As the crowd fled, six strikers were shot in the back and killed, one mortally wounded, and thirty others suffered less than mortal wounds.
Beacham obstructed court proceedings against himself and the other strikebreakers, and ordered some of the strikers arrested. Dozens of unionized workers were fired or evicted from their company homes, and after the defeat of the larger strike on September 23, the unionization effort in Honea Path largely came to an end. Until the 1994 publication of "The Uprising of '34" and the subsequent journalistic work of Dan Beacham's grandson, Frank Beacham, the events of the massacre were largely undiscussed in Honea Path. Today, the event is memorialized by a stone marker in nearby Dogwood Park.