Chicago teachers are known for their militancy. In 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union staged a landmark walkout that clogged the city’s streets and singlehandedly demonstrated the power of the strike. About a century earlier, the Chicago Teachers Federation (CTF) — founded in 1897 — successfully resisted a ban on their union by the city’s Board of Education.

And one of the CTF’s most prominent cheerleaders was none other than Eugene V. Debs. Debs, the famed trade unionist and Socialist, is well known for his stirring speeches to miners, steelworkers, and other totems of the industrial working class. But at a time when public sector workers were almost uniformly nonunion, Debs recognized that teachers, too, must be welcomed into the halls of organized labor.

In the following article, written in September 1915 while on a trip through the South and published in the American Socialist, Debs urges organized labor and his fellow Socialists to back the teachers’ cause. We’re pleased to bring you the brief missive, never before republished.