The year 1934 was marked across the country with protest against the suffering, the degradation, and the oppression of the Great Depression. Millions of workers clutched at hopes raised by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Some million and a half workers gave up nineteen million days of work in the nationwide industrial battle. Almost half of the disputes were fought mainly over the simple right to organize and bargain collectively. For two months, in San Francisco and along the entire Pacific Coast, the longshoremen and the seamen had been locked in one struggle in this nationwide battle.

And now, this somber procession bore the coffins of two men killed in a battle with police on July 5-the day imprinted as Bloody Thursday in the legends of San Francisco's storied waterfront. The first truck, escorted by a veterans' honor guard, carried the flagdraped casket of Howard S. Sperry, a longshoreman; the second, decorated by a simple spray of flowers, the casket of Nick Counderakis, a cook, known in the Communist Party as Nick Bordoise. They were followed by trucks banked high with flowers, a string of funeral cars carrying the mourning families, the lone band droning a death march, and a dozen men carrying a giant American flag.