Detroit May Day History
May Day, or International Workers Day, is a celebration observed in every country in the world on every May 1st for almost 150 years. In an attempt to divorce the american labor movement from the international labor movement, the US government invented Labor Day and made it a federal holiday.
As a result of this, May Day is not widely recognized in the US, even though for the rest of the world, "labor day" is recognized on May 1st. Stranger still is that May Day actually originated in the United States in recognition of the historic general strike on May 1 1886 which won the 8 hour work day, but also experienced bitter repression (such as the Haymarket affair). This victory in the US emboldened organized labor around the world and subsequently won the 8 hour day in many countries.
Despite the efforts of the government and the bosses to keep May Day out of the american public consciousness, the celebration remained an important and massively popular event in most major cities in the US until the late 1940s when McCarthyism attacked much of the leadership of organized labor and denounced May Day as “communist.” Since then, May Day has had varying degrees of popularity through the decades in various US cities, though for the past decade it has been growing larger and larger in more and more cities.