On November 11, 1919 — the first anniversary of the Armistice — an American Legion contingent in a parade in Centralia, Washington, turned toward the local IWW hall, which the Wobblies had reason to believe would be raided and destroyed as an earlier hall had been. As the marchers rushed the hall, gunfire broke out, leaving several Legionnaires dead and the IWW members charged with murder.
In the aftermath, the Wobbly and war veteran Wesley Everest was seized from jail by a mob, mutilated, and lynched from a railroad bridge; no one was ever charged with his killing. Eight IWW members were convicted of second-degree murder and sent to the Washington State Penitentiary in a trial widely condemned as unjust. The Centralia Massacre and its lynching became a symbol of the violent repression that broke the IWW in the postwar years.