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Mother Jones, Cesar Chavez, And Mahatma Gandhi's Fight For Child Labor Laws

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Fighting for rights does not have to be violent. Mother Jones fought for child labor laws, Cesar Chavez fought for migrant workers’ rights, and Gandhi fought for independence from Britain. Mother Jones, Cesar Chavez, and Mahatma Gandhi all helped to enact change by using peaceful methods to get their points across. Mother Jones was a kind person who helped fight for child labor laws. The text states, “Nationwide, eighty thousand children worked in the textile industry. In the South, Mother Jones had seen how dangerous their jobs were. Barefooted little girls and boys reached their tiny hands into the treacherous machinery to repair snapped threads or crawled underneath the machinery to oil it. At textile union headquarters, Mother Jones met more of these mill children. Their bodies were bone-thin, with hollow chests. Their shoulders were rounded from long hours spent hunched over the workbenches. Even worse, she saw ‘some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckles’—victims of mill accidents” (Pinkerton Josephson). This shows the struggle the children had to go through in the factories. Mother Jones wanted to fight for their rights just because she wanted justice for the children. Pinkerton Josephson says, “Mother Jones, now seventy-three, gathered a large group of mill children and their parents. She led them on a one-mile march from Philadelphia’s Independence Square to its courthouse lawn. Mother Jones and a few

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