10/14/2026
Just a part of New England labor history of which seldom hears.
On February 21, 1922, Pawtucket police fired into a crowd of roughly a thousand people outside the Jenckes Spinning Company, and a grocery clerk named Juan D'Assumpcau died in the street.
The strike had started a month earlier, when Rhode Island mill owners demanded another 20 percent wage cut on top of the 22.5 percent workers had already absorbed in 1920. Weavers at the Royal Mill walked out first, and the strike spread fast through the Pawtuxet and Blackstone Valleys until 40,000 to 50,000 New England textile workers were off the job by mid February. Rhode Island's governor called in the militia, who mounted machine guns on the roofs of mills in Pontiac and Natick and escorted strikebreakers past the picket lines.
The shooting in Pawtucket didn't end the strike. By spring, deputy sheriffs were evicting strikers' families from company owned housing in the Pawtuxet Valley, and the standoff dragged on for roughly 200 days before wage cuts were finally reversed at most mills, starting with Lawrence, Massachusetts that August. D'Assumpcau's funeral procession drew 5,000 to 7,000 mourners through the same streets where he had been shot days before.
It's a piece of Rhode Island labor history that rarely makes it into the state's tourism brochures. What do you think it took for mill families to keep striking for 200 days with evictions already underway?
