FANNIE SELLINS MURDER (1919)

Fannie Sellins was an effective and charismatic organizer for the United Mineworkers. A leader of a garment strike in St. Louis, she came to Pittsburgh in 1913 and worked for UMW organizing drives in West Virginia and southwest Pennsylvania. She described her work as the distribution of “clothing and food to starving women and babies, to assist poverty stricken mothers and bring children into the world, and to minister to the sick and close the eyes of the dying.” She was arrested defying an injunction against union organizing in Colliers, West Virginia. “I am free and I have a right to walk or talk any place in this country as long as I obey the law … the only wrong they can say I’ve done is to take shoes to the little children in Colliers who needed shoes. And … if it be wrong to put shoes upon those little feet, then I will continue to do wrong as long as I have hands and feet to crawl to Colliers.”

On August 26, 1919, as Fannie walked with miners’ wives and children to a striking mine in Natrona Heights, she saw a striker, Joseph Starzelski, being beaten. Rushing to his aid, the mine police shot her in the back and crushed her skull with a powerful blow. The picture of the murdered Sellins was hung in union halls during the 1919 Steel Strike that began just weeks later. The UMW beautifully marked the grave of Sellins and Starzelski in Arnold cemetery.

Fannie Sellins marker and grave, Union Cemetery, Pa., Route 366, Arnold