It was July 24, 1899 in New York City.

Brooklyn streetcar workers were on strike. Twenty-one strikers faced allegations of plotting to dynamite the Fifth Avenue elevated train track. In the evening, the Socialist Labor Party’s Daniel De Leon gathered a crowd at Cooper Union to discuss the strike. “All the Socialists in New York go to such a mass meeting as they would go to a circus,” reported the next day’s New York Sun, noting the meeting’s raucous atmosphere and impolite tone.

But this wasn’t where the real action was. Across town, five thousand young boys spilled out of the New Irving Hall, making a racket heard from the Bronx to the Battery. “A citizen unused to the ways of the New York newsboy might have thought it was a riot,” noted one journalist. In fact, it was a meeting of the News-boys Union and their supporters to discuss the rapidly escalating strike action they had begun several days prior. One colorful character after another, children and adults alike, took the stage to beg the boys to soften their tactics — just that day, the young strikers had overturned newsstands and delivery wagons, clubbed scabs, shredded unauthorized newspapers, and even intercepted and destroyed shipments of newsprint at train stations in New Jersey and in the Hudson Valley.