Celebrate Orlando’s 100th Labor Day.
On Monday Sept. 3, 1917, the city of Orlando celebrated its first Labor Day. The celebration featured a parade from downtown to the fairgrounds, speeches by local labor leaders and politicians canonizing workers, the city and God — followed by prizes earned by wining athletic events.
Labor Day originated to honor workers and labor unions in New York City in 1882. Within years, labor unions in large cities throughout the country organized Labor Day celebrations. Then, in 1894, President Grover Cleveland and Congress acted quickly to declare the first Monday of September as “Labor Day,” thus giving it national recognition. This federal designation did not immediately translate into a uniform tradition of practices, but growing cities in industrial America took to celebrating Labor Day and providing local unions a day when some workers and their families could parade, picnic and enjoy sports in a downtown park.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, the newly formed Orlando Trades and Labor Council decided to launch the city’s first ever city-wide Labor Day celebration. Before 1917, Labor Day was a day off for local residents while the newspaper reported of the celebrations in Tampa, Jacksonville, Daytona Beach and St. Augustine. Railroads offered families reduced fares throughout the weekend to encourage Orlando residents to attend events in those cities. But 1917 was different. The Trades and Labor Council, along with city leaders, decided for the first time to host the event as a way to introduce the city as a growing urban center. Mayor James L. Giles declared during his speech at the fairgrounds, “Let us not forget the love and duty we owe to our own beautiful city of Orlando — our home … Orlando should double her population within the next five years and give steady employment to our home people.”
The celebrations electrified the city. However, in the small community of in Orange County, one resident claimed that “Labor Day was not specially observed here … as every day is labor day, hustling to procure the means to buy the necessary food to live on.”
There is a famous quote misattributed to Mark Twain but has no known author: “History doesn't repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.” In 1916, Sidney J. Catts, campaigned for governor of Florida and won office by demagoguing immigrants, Catholics, African-Americans and others he believed “un-American.” In August of 1917, with the country embroiled in the First World War, he issued a Labor Day Proclamation asking all Floridians to fast and pray that “God would bring peace to the warring nations.”
The Orlando Sentinel does not mention the participation of black citizens or their unions at this first Labor Day, but I am certain they were not allowed to attend, as Orlando was a Jim Crow city. Florida’s own James Weldon Johnson, the field secretary for the NAACP, organized the Silent March as a national protest of lynching and racial violence against African-Americans in New York City during the summer of 1917. He begged local Florida branches to hold similar rallies in support but was rebuffed by local leaders because of fear of inciting racial violence. At the end of the first Labor Day in Orlando, the Trades and Labor Council donated money raised at the celebration to the Orlando Red Cross.
In 2018, we witness this nation more politically polarized than at any time outside the Civil War, coming off the summer of hate with the events of Charlottesville (not to mention Pulse last year) and other communities rocked by public protests of hate, racism and homophobia by a small by vocal and invigorated minority.
Now our eyes are turned to organizations like the Red Cross as we keep the residents of Houston and those devastated by Hurricane Harvey in our prayers, thoughts and, most important, in our charity.
Mayor Giles in 1917 imagined Orlando as a city of hope and opportunity, and I am sure the Orlando of 2017 might not be the one he imagined, absent Jim Crow signs and segregated life as one example.
I would urge everyone celebrating Orlando’s 100th Labor Day to and act now to put the city and the country on a better path 100 years from today.