Maria Dunn – We Were Good People (Live) – Copyright Maria Dunn & William…: http://t.co/ARpujqVQ

The Edmonton Hunger March took place on Tuesday, December 20, 1932. Protesters planned to walk in an orderly and peaceful manner from Market Square (currently the Stanley Milner Public Library) to the Legislature to ask for government assistance for farmers and the unemployed in the midst of the Depression. Wielding billy clubs, police on horseback broke up the march. In researching this event, I read an unpublished letter to the Edmonton Journal, written by William Dolinsky in 1999, in which he described the events he had witnessed. He wrote: “I remember well this Bloody Tuesday” and asserted, so eloquently and simply: “We were good people”. Of the 10,000 people reportedly in the square that day, I imagined the debacle from the point of view of a mother with two children.
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I was an ordinary mother in 1932 My husband out of work and more worries here than food I was weary with asking the man for relief Feeling like a beggar, being treated like a thief
So when word of a protest started going round I bundled my boys for the long walk downtown And bless them, they didn’t make a peep about the cold One was only 5, the other 9 years old
We were good people, gathered in the square It wasn’t ease and comfort had driven us there
Well the air was almost festive with Christmas trees in view But as we moved to leave the square and march the Avenue A sound I’d never heard before turned my heart to lead The sound of a billy club cracking open heads
Well I’d always taught my sons we were safe around police But when they charged on horses, I dragged us off the street It made me so angry they’d endanger children too In silencing the voices of 1932
We were good people, gathered in the square It wasn’t ease and comfort had driven us there But they treated us like criminals for showing our despair Oh I remember well this Bloody Tuesday
Where was the government who wouldn’t let us starve? Who wouldn’t take the farmer’s land, who knew we worked so hard We, the people, were just scraping by for our daily bread We had voted for the cowards and away they turned their heads
Now I’ve read it in the paper, this supposed “Hunger March” Was the scheme of Reds, they said, our hunger was a farce Well I don’t care what they say, for me it did ring true An ordinary mother in 1932