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"1877: The Grand Army of Starvation" In 1877 an explosion of working-class protest rocked the United States and propelled the labor movement forward in the struggle for economic and social justice. Pittsburgh was at the center of this historic upsurge. In the era of dramatic industrialization following the Civil War, the most powerful of the big business corporations were the railroad companies. In order to protect their profits during the economic depression that had begun in 1873, they …

…the large number of California's unemployed. An issue addressed in the movie 1877: The Grand Army of Starvation by the narrator James Earl Jones was the idea of equality. He believes that equality wouldn't be achieved unless those that were oppressed began to fight for their rights. At the time they began doing this, but they were far from equality. Equality wouldn't fully be achieved until blacks, immigrants, Native Americans, whites, etc. were all treated equally.