Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) formally announced her run for president on Saturday at a rally in the former mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts—the setting for one of the country's most famous labor strikes a little more than a century ago.
Warren, who first told supporters she was forming an exploratory committee back in December, shared the story of the women textile workers at Everett Mill who shut down the looms in 1912 and walked out to protest dangerous conditions and win better wages and overtime pay. "These workers led by women didn't have much…Nevertheless, they persisted," she said to big applause.
She described her childhood in a middle-class family in Oklahoma and her rise from the daughter of a janitor to a law professor and a US senator, saying that over the years those opportunities had become harder to come by for many Americans.