WE NEVER FORGET – Tuesday June 10, 1913 Ipswich, Massachusetts – Nicholetta Paudelopoulou, 27, Shot Down by Police on IWW Picket Line
New York Tribune June 12, 1913
On Tuesday June 10, 1913 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Nicholetta Paudelopoulou left Brown’s Essex Mill at the end of her work day and walked down the street to the Ipswich Hosiery Mill. Here she stopped to observe a picket line of I.W.W. strikers. The Industrial Workers of the World had been conducting a strike at this mill for seven weeks. Five hundred of the strikers were Italians, and one hundred were Greeks, perhaps friends of hers. Sadly, five hundred English-speaking workers had chosen to scab on their fellow workers.
Suddenly, the police opened fire on the picketers, wounding eight. They later gave the excuse that the “foreign” strikers were “jostling” the English-speaking strikebreakers. Seven of the wounded were taken to a hospital in Salem. Miss Paudelopoulou was shot in the top of the head. She was taken to a nearby doctor’s office where she died just before 8 PM without regaining consciousness.
Nicholetta Paudelopoulou was 27 years old. She was survived by her mother, six sisters and a brother in New York, and her father and brother-in-law in Greece.
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From The Boston Globe of June 12, 1913:
Funeral of Miss Pandelopulos.
[…..]
New York Tribune June 14, 1913
The funeral of Miss Pandelopulos, the only victim of the engagement of last night, was held this afternoon. A large company of men and women of her race gathered in the tenement at 22½ Market st, where she lived with her mother, six sisters and a brother, at 3:30 for prayers. Subsequently, they followed the body to the Greek Orthodox Church on Agawam Heights, where the services were conducted by Rev. Paulikop Marinika.
The ritual was punctuated by the pitiful lamentations of the members of the family of the young woman. Later, at the grave in the Highland Cemetery, the burial service of the church was supplemented by demonstrations of grief by the sisters of the deceased, the rending of the fabric of their waists and the mutilation of their braided hair.
The dead woman had been the sole support of her mother, five sisters and brother. All but the youngest girls worked in the mills, and all save the girl now dead were on strike. The father is in Greece and the husband of one of the sisters is serving in the Grecian Army.
Nicolata Pandelopulos, when shot, was an innocent witness of the encounter between the police and her striking countrymen.
[Newsclip and emphasis added.]
Massachusetts Death Certificate for Nikoleta Pantelopolou
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