Welcome to our website.

We hope you find this site both inspirational and informative. We appreciate all email with questions or comments.

The state of Colorado deployed machine guns, bomber aircraft, and cannons to control the miners. Their message: we have the authority and the power; you, the out-of-control workers, must submit.

But the workers were not just any workers. These were miners, men who descended on a rickety cage into the dark maw of hell every workday of their lives. They worked with blasting powder; they fought with coal car mules. They waded through black water floods; they chiseled a living from the depths. How can you intimidate a man who faces death daily?

But the strikers had another surprise, another front that would not be intimidated. The women of the 1920s coal camps became the miners’ most valuable allies.

Slaughter in Serene: the Columbine Coal Strike Reader uncovers a history that had nearly been forgotten. It is a history of triumph and tragedy, of working class dreams and rapacious corporate greed.

Eric Margolis, Joanna Sampson, Phil Goodstein and Richard Myers present a compelling history of the 1927 coal strike led by the Industrial Workers of the World. This was the first strike in which Colorado miners were not defeated utterly. This was the last strike in which a state militia played their dubious role. Sadly, it was just one of a number of strikes in which miners and their families confronted violence perpetrated by the power of the state.

Slaughter in Serene: The Columbine Coal Strike Reader $19.05ea

The Bread and Roses Workers’ Cultural Center in Denver is one way we continue the celebration of working class culture. We display art; we pass along our history in stories, books, music, poetry; we honor our heroes and heroines; and we prepare for a future where work will be a matter of creativity and cooperation, not the drudgery and exploitation it is now.

Our aim is to develop harmony between life and work, and our method is to identify and promote such endeavors by working people in their everyday lives all around us, all around the world.

The project exists because we need to develop a modern alternative to disintergrating forms of community and culture. Commercial relations have failed in this regard, even as they have eroded traditional structures like family, church and school. What has not been broken is the sense of shared values and comaraderie that arises from working together—again, in the healthy, creative sense, not the usual alienated “work.” And the possibilities that grow out of this are expanding. While there has been a shift away from heavy, industrial labor especially in the U.S., the organization of people into working collectives has expanded tremendously in recent years. As we grow into a global society, the impulse for productive, yet eglitarian and cooperative worker-based relations will only increase with time.

Practically, we want to be a magnet for working class art and cultural forms that embody a feeling of solidarity, and a mirror that helps working folks feel good about themselves and their work.

We are a new and small institution. So far we have:

• established a space in west Denver (currently closed; we are looking for a new location)

• collected a small array of books, posters, T-shirts, buttons and stickers that express our history and spirit

• developed displays of Colorado coal miners’ history, and a tribute to the groundbreaking P-9 strike of packinghouse workers in 1985, plus memorials to Joe Hill and the Bread and Roses strike.

Click on the links below to learn more...

* Music by Caroline Kohlsart,Words by James Oppenheim.

Here in Colorado we have joined the Pueblo steelworkers on the anniversary of their strike and caravanned to the Erie for the dedication of their miners’ memorial. In the fall of 2000 we presented an art show on the emerging conflict between neighbors and developers.

We have much to do and we need your help. If you are interested in joining in or finding out more about our effort, please contact us. If you would like to help develop activities and programs -- from film showings to reading circles to actually producing silkscreened T-shirts -- contact us. Please help with whatever donations you can for our non-profit work, and please pass this information on to your friends and associates.

Here’s our email address: info@workersbreadandroses.org.