Unarmed strikers mowed down by machine guns draw a hard lesson: the next picket line must come armed. One survivor vowed never to picket again without protection after watching men 'die just like ducks.' Repression doesn't end resistance so much as change its form.
When the powerful side of a conflict hides its own dead and no official account is ever given, the event survives only as uncertain, competing memories. Witnesses can't agree how many died, and grim traces like bones turning up weeks later are met with silence. The missing record becomes part of how the violence is remembered.
Labor battles can begin when owners flatly refuse any recognition of workers' organization and try to run union men off while bringing in replacement workers. In the miners' telling, a polite plea to sign with the union met a curt 'Hell no' the day before the shooting started. The refusal, not just the strike, is remembered as the cause.
Struggles live on through people who saw them as children in the middle of ordinary routines. A six-year-old walking her father's paycheck to the company store heard the shooting begin, and told the story decades later. Memory of resistance is handed down through families, not only through the fighters themselves.