Book Highlights MLK's Labor, Social Justice Work
http://www.blackradionetwork.com/book_highlights_mlk_s_labor__social_justice_work
Jan 7, 2011
SEATTLE Martin Luther King Jr. led the American civil rights
movement but his deep and active commitment to labor and social
justice is often forgotten.
A new Beacon Press book, "All Labor Has Dignity", brings together 16
of King's speeches on economic justice, many of them buried in the
King archives until now. Michael K. Honey, a former Southern civil
rights organizer and the Haley Professor of Humanities at the
University of Washington Tacoma, edited the speeches and wrote an
introductory essay for the book.
Honey has done a great service in gathering the speeches, said Eric
Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University.
"King's dream called for nothing less than a radical restructuring of
American economic life," he added. "This is a more complex King than
we celebrate every January, forever frozen on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial delivering his 'I Have a Dream Speech.' King's dream
called for nothing less than a radical restructuring of American
economic life."
"People forget that Dr. King was every bit as committed to economic
justice as he was to ending racial segregation," Honey said. "As we
struggle with massive unemployment, a staggering racial wealth gap
and near collapse of our financial system, King's prophetic writings
and speeches underscore his relevance for today."
The first section of Honey's book covers highlights of the civil
rights movement: the Montgomery bus boycott, the student sit-ins and
freedom rides, the events leading up to the March on Washington in 1963.
The second section shows King broadening his agenda from civil rights
to economic rights for all. He told listeners that "the evil of war,
the evil of economic injustice and the evil of racial injustice" are
intertwined.
But relationships between organized labor and civil rights leaders
were complicated. In his introductory essay, Honey points out that
unions were key in establishing the Great Society and civil rights
victories in the 1960s. However, one of the largest labor groups, the
Congress of Industrial Organizations, in earlier years had expelled
some of the strongest civil rights unions for following "the communist line."
In 1955, when the CIO merged with the American Federation of Labor to
become the AFL-CIO, the more racially conservative AFL dominated. It
meant that building unions and railroad workers in the AFL continued
excluding or segregating women and racial minorities. Also, the
National Labor Relations Board didn't require unions to ban discrimination.
King brought attention to these injustices, such as in the speech
from which the name of the book comes. He spoke to Memphis sanitation
workers, many of them African-American, in March 1968. They had
walked away from their jobs after two fellow workers were crushed by
a defective garbage truck. The city had refused to update its
equipment, and workers' families didn't receive either insurance or
workers' compensation.
It was part of institutionalized abuse. In "Going Down Jericho Road,"
another of Honey's books, he explains how the city, for example,
routinely sent workers home without pay when it rained and required
extra hours unpaid when it didn't. There were no toilets available to
workers, and nowhere to clean up or change clothes.
"You are highlighting the economic issue," King told the sanitation
workers in his speech. "You are going beyond purely civil rights to
questions of human rights."
As the crowd loudly agreed, King spontaneously called for a general
strike. All the workers, including teachers, students, housekeepers,
commercial cleaners, factory and city employees would not show up for
work on an appointed day. As it turned out, however, that day found
Memphis shut down by a bizarre snowstorm.
Weeks later, King agreed to return to Memphis for a march on city
hall. On the evening of April 3, in the last speech of his life, the
"Mountaintop" address, King reached out to the entire Memphis
community in what was clearly a union message: "You may not be on
strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together."
The following day outside his motel room, King was assassinated.
To offer the most accurate versions of the speeches, Honey
painstakingly compared written versions to audio ones.
The CD that comes with the book contains King's speech to the Retail,
Wholesale and Department Store Union District 65 in 1962, when he
talked of racism, poverty and war; it also contains his March 1968
speech in Memphis.
It's clear that as time went on, King saw his mission going beyond
civil rights to the rights of all humans to live in decent peace.
"Dr. King was a tireless champion of the working class. But 'All
Labor Has Dignity' is not just a testament to his rhetorical legacy
-- it is a call to action," Richard L. Trumka, president of the
AFL-CIO, said in a written statement.
Honey's other books are "Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights:
Organizing Memphis Workers" (1993); "Black Workers Remember: An Oral
History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle" (1999);
and "Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther
King's Last Campaign" (2007).
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