When people walk by this cemetery, you see the tombstones with very familiar names in the Hazleton area.

But what they don't see is this row right here of 14 almost obscure names.

These individuals are the victims of one of the worst massacres in all of United States history.

Could it be that the powers and the influential people were that powerful and influential to almost whitewash this from memory and history?

Somewhere up here, actually right by where the fire engines are, if we take a look, coming in this way, I know it much better if I come from the other side, but if we take a look, here we go, I believe, yes, right here.

If you count them, there'll be 14, 14 victims of the 19 are buried in this mass grave.

What happened here was the culmination of all kind of labor unrest in the last part of the 19th century, particularly in the anthracite mining area.

And if you really research this, there was a lot of anti-immigrant thing with Eastern Europeans, and that is what really became the focal point of this.

You can read something in a book, you can hear people talk about things, but when you see these graves and the tombstones and the names on there, it makes it much more authentic and real.

Anthracite mining was absolutely one of the more dangerous and horrendous jobs that you could ever have, and it probably would fit into the paradigm right after slavery.

Yes, these people were free, but they were chained where they really were never going to get out of this.

Company store, company housing, and the living conditions were absolutely dreadful.

The hours were long, safety concerns were not an issue by any means.

So there was a lot of, if you will, physical and psychological abuse for people that worked in the mines.

In Harrisburg, they passed an act called the Campbell Act, which put a 3% tax, if you were an immigrant, only on immigrants, and that certainly didn't sit real well with the immigrant miners.

You also had the language differential, where they really didn't understand a lot of things, and the United Mine Workers were trying to formulate and get these miners to be unionized, and it was at that flashpoint where all this happened.

Men, we are going to fight this injunction to a finish.

We are organized now.

There had been strikes all throughout the area, and these were miners from Harwood, and they were all Eastern European, mostly Slovak, and what had happened is the night before, the Italian miners on the north side of town in Latimer went to Harwood and said, if you guys march and come to Latimer, we will walk out and join the strike.

Seemed innocent enough, but unbeknownst, the powers that be were really definitively saying, we're putting a stop to this today.

These men carried an American flag with them.

This flag represented true freedom, and that they were allowed to march peacefully, First Amendment rights, and even though they might not have been schooled in civics, they did know that, and so they had two flags.

One only made it to McKenna's Corner in West Hazleton, where the first confrontation took place, and the deputies actually took the flag and smashed it and ripped it apart, and now one of them survived as they marched on to Latimer, and they were carrying it because they truly believed they were protected by this American system.

They should have been, but unfortunately that day, they were not.

Once these deputies saw the sheriff kind of being surrounded, that was the excuse they were going to start firing those Winchesters, and once it started, there was no turning back, and people that were eyewitnesses were absolutely blown away.

They're not firing over their heads.

These aren't, they're actually shooting.

People are dropping.

People look at the blood, and it was later discovered, the undertakers and people at the Hazleton Hospital, that the majority of victims were shot in the back.

Very simply, if you have 19 individuals who are shot and murdered, and you have another 50 to 60 who were wounded, if that happened today, you know what kind of coverage that would get.

There was a trial in the spring the following year, six months later.

The lawyers and the powers that be were sharp enough to make sure that a lot of the evidence was not going to be credible.

All of the deputies, the sheriff, were all exonerated.

The community was aghast, but very quickly, they started to get amnesia, which led to the total amnesia for all these years, where it's almost forgotten in the United States.

It was only five years later where the largest of all anthracite strikes took place, and that was the anthracite strike of 1902.

And that was a benchmark, changed everything, huge moment in labor history.

That does not happen without the Latimer Massacre.

Despite the ugliness of that day, good did finally triumph.

But let us never forget the victims who paid the ultimate price for that, and we must never forget these gentlemen.

© transcript Emily Beynon