Don’t miss the Mayday Parade with HOBT on May 6th

This year, the MayDay Parade & Festival, on Sunday, May 6, will follow a Transition Town theme: visioning and energizing our transition away from fossil fuel dependency toward a more sustainable community. This theme will be enacted in the Parade and the Tree of Life Ceremony. Free MayDay Workshops to build puppets and practice to become part of the Parade and Tree of Life Ceremony will be held on Saturdays, beginning this Saturday, April 7, from 9 to 11 a.m. and from 1 to 3 p.m. and also on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7 to 9 p.m.

Heart of the Beast is seeking committed volunteer MayDay Block Hosts for each block of the Parade Route. They will provide training, support and necessary materials to the Block Hosts, who will act as representatives of In the Heart of the Beast theater and as community organizers, educators and safety marshals. You do not have to live on the Parade Route to host a block. Any interested individual, family, group of friends, organization or business is eligible! For more information, to sign up, or with questions please contact Brie Jonna at bjonna@hobt.org or 612-721-2535, ext. 18.

The celebration of Mayday is an ancient ritual marking the beginning of spring. In medieval England workers were given the day off to enjoy the first warm day and dance around a Maypole. For hundreds of years workers were given that day to celebrate.

On May 4, 1886, in Haymarket Square in Chicago, socialists and anarchists were speaking to a large demonstration of workers about the eight-hour day. Police were ready to break up the demonstration when someone placed a bomb under a police wagon. The blast and resulting gunfire killed eight officers (probably most of them died from friendly fire). Eight of the anarchists were tried for murder and four were convicted and executed.

Since that time, Mayday for most workers throughout the world has meant a celebration of the struggle of working people against the interests of capital and government, the 99% versus the 1%. President Eisenhower sympathized with the anxiety of American capitalists in the 1950s when socialist countries began to have military parades on Mayday to show their determination to protect workers’ rights, and he changed the international holiday in America to the first Monday in September and called it Labor Day.

For more than 40 years, Heart of the Beast has reclaimed the first Sunday in May as a celebration for the working people of South Minneapolis.