Fanny Sellins: Murdered on the Eve of a Steel Strike
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
In Union Cemetery here lies Fanny Sellins, an organizer for the United Mine Workers who was shot and killed in Brackenridge on August twenty-sixth, nineteen nineteen, the day before a nationwide steel strike was set to begin. Sellins had spent years working in the coalfields, organizing workers and fighting for safer conditions. That day, deputies and coal and iron police beat the miner Joseph Starzelski to death.
When Sellins intervened, deputies shot her and fractured her skull. Three deputies were eventually indicted, but a nineteen twenty-three trial ended in acquittal, and the gunman who fired the fatal shots never appeared in court. The steel strike went forward but was crushed within months.
Sellins and Starzelski are buried together here beneath a monument erected by the workers whose cause they served.
