On this day in Labor History the year was 1934.
That as the day that the bank robber known as Pretty Boy Floyd was gunned down by federal agents in Ohio.
He was born Charles Arthur Floyd in 1904 in Georgia.
His family moved to Oklahoma when he was a boy.
Like many Oklahomans during this era, he fell on hard economic times.
Floyd turned to crime.
He did a four year stretch in a Missouri prison for a payroll robbery.
When he got out, he tried to get a job in the Oklahoma oil fields.
Unable to find work, Floyd took up bank robbing.
He robbed banks in Kentucky, Ohio and Missouri.
He got caught and convicted in Ohio, but escaped on his train trip to prison.
He made his way back to Oklahoma.
There he became a folk hero.
Locals called him the “Robin Hood of The Cookson Hills.”
Legend had it that Floyd destroyed mortgage papers when he robbed banks, winning him friends among farmers reeling from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.
Floyd became a national fugitive when he was accused of killing federal agents in Kansas City.
He denied he was involved in the killings.
Finally, the law caught up with Floyd in an Ohio cornfield.
His body was returned to Oklahoma, where as many as 40 thousands came to his funeral.
Woody Guthrie remembered Floyd in song.
February 20 - Angelina Grimke is Born
February 19 - Philly Street Car Workers Spark General Strike
February 18 - Anti-Slavery Begins in America
February 17 - Standing Up By Sitting Down
February 16 - The Wisconsin Uprising Begins
February 15 - The Uprising of the 20,000 Comes to a Close
February 14 - Kansas City Laundresses Walk Off the Job
February 13 - Martial Law Declared to Crush the UAW
February 12 - The NAACP is Founded
February 11 - Cutting Corners on Safety at Sequoyah I
February 10 - Forty-Three Workers Buried Alive
February 9 - Organizing Bloody Harlan
February 8 - Butte Copper Miners Join the 1919 Strike Wave
February 7 - Strike at Cripple Creek
February 6 - Philly Garment Workers Win!
February 5 - The Fight for Craft Governance
February 4 - Solidarity on the Coast
February 3 - Anti-Trust Injunctions Used Against Labor
February 2 - The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
February 1 - A Pivotal Moment in the Flint Sit-Down
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