Michael K. Honey: The legacy of MLK ... Defending the right to organize
[Michael K. Honey is Haley Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and author of"Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign" (W.W. Norton).]
The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. casts a shadow over events in our country, and never more appropriately so than in this electoral season of 2008. In a real sense, King paved the way for Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign of hope. Using the Bible and the Constitution, King argued and demonstrated that ordinary people can change history, by organizing themselves into a coherent force for change.
At the same time, many of the democratic advances of the 20th century are in jeopardy today, none more so than the right to organize unions, without which working people cannot raise their incomes and improve their lives. We have a long way to go before people at their workplace are afforded the constitutional and human rights that the civil rights and labor movements struggled for, and that King died for.
Many of this year's presidential candidates seem to want to demonize illegal immigrants. Former senator John Edwards, who quit the race last week, is almost alone among them in explaining that our "immigration problem" is actually a labor problem. "Free trade" laws have helped U.S. agribusiness to undersell corn farmers in Mexico, sending them streaming north in search of work; those laws make it easier for multinational corporations to outsource unionized jobs with wages that support a family to cheaper labor markets abroad. Families on both sides of the border are hurt by the catastrophic destruction of the farming economy and well-paying working-class jobs.
In Immokalee, Fla., immigrant fruit and vegetable pickers work six days a week, 12 hours a day, for about $13,000 a year, poverty wages by anyone's standard. Florida's growers have invested millions in a campaign to stop them from getting just one penny per pound more for the crops they pick. In Smithfield, N.C., black, Hispanic and white meatpacking workers get poverty wages while employers fire, harass and intimidate, and federal officers raid the homes of immigrant workers and deport them.
South of our border, Mexican authorities beat up teachers in Oaxaca; Guatemalan authorities kidnap unionists at Coca-Cola plants; Colombian death squads kill hundreds of union leaders. Elsewhere in the world, China too often crushes union organizing.
Repression in the United States is not as severe, but Americans are similarly challenged when it comes to guaranteeing people union rights. In Washington, Republicans in the Senate killed the Employee Free Choice Act last year, which would have allowed workers to unionize if a majority sign cards expressing their consent. President Bush's National Labor Relations Board has twisted labor law to make it almost impossible to organize. Tennessee's "right to work" law prohibits the union shop, allowing "free riders" to get union benefits without paying union dues. The laws are stacked against workers.
No wonder that only about 12 percent of American workers belong to unions -- 7.5 percent of those in the private sector and nearly 36 percent of workers in the public sector. Many in the private sector are especially scared to join unions, because so many people have been fired or blocked for promotions when they do.
Low union membership translates to poverty wages linked to high infant mortality and low high school graduation rates for the working and unemployed poor.
Wary of a possible return to the violence that had convulsed Downtown Memphis one day earlier, National Guardsmen blocked off Beale Street as striking sanitation workers protested on March 29, 1968. "All labor has dignity," Martin Luther King Jr. preached. "You are ... reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages."
The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. joined King at a press conference on March 28, 1968, where they vowed that the sanitation workers' protests would continue. "We know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters," King had told a crowd at Mason Temple days earlier. "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?"
Workers in the United States and across our borders are not enemies. We have a common interest in enforcing the right of workers to organize, so that wages will rise, consumer spending will increase and our economies will move forward.
What does all this have to do with King and his legacy? A great deal.
'All labor has dignity': King's quest for labor rights
In January, AFL-CIO union members from all over the United States gathered in Memphis to remember King and honor sanitation workers Taylor Rogers, Joe Warren, William Ross, Baxter Leach, J.B. Trotter and others who stood up for their rights with union organizer T.O. Jones in 1968.
During a 65-day strike, the sanitation workers' families lived on very little. Memphis police clubbed people senseless and sprayed them with Mace, a blinding chemical made for use in war. Yet the workers kept marching. Until recently, their story was almost lost to history. But increasingly, others across the country want to hear it.
Americans are also coming around to seeing King as more than a civil rights leader who "had a dream." Most people know King died in Memphis, but many now want to know why. What was going on in this city anyhow? Most people don't know King died fighting for the right of workers to organize unions, in one of the most dramatic and significant battles of the 1960s.
King was far more than a dreamer. He said a union is the best anti-poverty program available to poor people with jobs, and he supported unions all his life. He knew most of the major union leaders in the country and recognized that unions had paved the way for the civil rights movement. He always had a black working-class constituency, from maids in Montgomery to teenagers without work in Birmingham to sanitation workers exploited in Memphis. Time and again, King gave voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless.
When King came to Memphis, he shone a beacon of hope, and media attention, on underpaid, overworked laborers for the city of Memphis. "King was like Moses," said striker James Robinson.
"It was just like Jesus would be coming into my life," said striker Clinton Burrows. "I was full of joy and full of determination. Wherever King was, I wanted to be there."
Five weeks into the strike, on March 18, 1968, King delivered an impromptu speech at Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ. More than 10,000 people crammed the auditorium, many overflowing into hallways and stairways, creating the largest indoor mass rally of the civil rights-era South. "All labor has dignity," King preached. "You are reminding not only Memphis but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America."
After passage of the civil rights and voting rights bills in 1964 and 1965, he said, "One era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality."
King came to Memphis in the midst of his Poor People's Campaign, whose goal was to organize the unemployed and desperately poor of all colors in America's ghettoes, barrios, Indian reservations and rural areas. He wanted them to go to Washington to demand that money allocated for the Vietnam war be spent instead to abolish poverty. King left Memphis to focus on the Washington campaign, but when he returned to lead a mass march on March 28, chaos occurred.
Black youth, street people and provocateurs broke out downtown windows with picket signs; the police attacked, randomly beating, Macing and shooting people; one youth died and hundreds went to the hospital.
It was a disaster for King, and the city of Memphis. He returned a few days later, planning to lead a nonviolent march, and gave a brilliant speech to a crowd on the stormy evening of April 3. Under immense pressure from multiple death threats, King called on people to be like the Good Samaritan going down Jericho road. Stop to help a stranger in need, he said, even if it imperils your own life. "The question is not, 'If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?' 'If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?' That's the question."
King lived by that creed and died by it. The next day, an assassin cut him down.
We need to recall King's warning: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Instead of denigrating immigrants, we need to renew King's call to "planetize our movement for social justice" by helping workers in other countries organize to improve conditions so they don't have to emigrate. At home, we need to regain the right to organize at the workplace. We need to strengthen laws to allow organizing, and reignite our own multiracial coalition. We need to return to King's campaign to end war and poverty and support union rights.
This may sound hopelessly unrealistic to some, yet hope is born from large, idealistic goals. Public-sector workers organized effectively because King and others raised their hopes and eventually government became more accepting of their right to a union. King said that organizing is the only sure way for low-wage workers to raise their wages and change their lives. We can still hope that King's larger goal of a "beloved community" is possible.
But it won't happen unless we remember and understand our history. For most of those who lived through the epic 1968 strike, the lesson of the past to the present is clear: Labor rights, human rights and civil rights remain indivisible. "We can get more organized together than we can apart," King told Memphis workers and their supporters.
Rev. James Lawson, a key ministerial leader in the Memphis strike, called it a "watershed moment" that brought the plight of the working poor to the attention of the country. We should remember that moment and honor its legacy.
Read entire article at Memphis Commercial Appeal
The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. casts a shadow over events in our country, and never more appropriately so than in this electoral season of 2008. In a real sense, King paved the way for Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign of hope. Using the Bible and the Constitution, King argued and demonstrated that ordinary people can change history, by organizing themselves into a coherent force for change.
At the same time, many of the democratic advances of the 20th century are in jeopardy today, none more so than the right to organize unions, without which working people cannot raise their incomes and improve their lives. We have a long way to go before people at their workplace are afforded the constitutional and human rights that the civil rights and labor movements struggled for, and that King died for.
Many of this year's presidential candidates seem to want to demonize illegal immigrants. Former senator John Edwards, who quit the race last week, is almost alone among them in explaining that our "immigration problem" is actually a labor problem. "Free trade" laws have helped U.S. agribusiness to undersell corn farmers in Mexico, sending them streaming north in search of work; those laws make it easier for multinational corporations to outsource unionized jobs with wages that support a family to cheaper labor markets abroad. Families on both sides of the border are hurt by the catastrophic destruction of the farming economy and well-paying working-class jobs.
In Immokalee, Fla., immigrant fruit and vegetable pickers work six days a week, 12 hours a day, for about $13,000 a year, poverty wages by anyone's standard. Florida's growers have invested millions in a campaign to stop them from getting just one penny per pound more for the crops they pick. In Smithfield, N.C., black, Hispanic and white meatpacking workers get poverty wages while employers fire, harass and intimidate, and federal officers raid the homes of immigrant workers and deport them.
South of our border, Mexican authorities beat up teachers in Oaxaca; Guatemalan authorities kidnap unionists at Coca-Cola plants; Colombian death squads kill hundreds of union leaders. Elsewhere in the world, China too often crushes union organizing.
Repression in the United States is not as severe, but Americans are similarly challenged when it comes to guaranteeing people union rights. In Washington, Republicans in the Senate killed the Employee Free Choice Act last year, which would have allowed workers to unionize if a majority sign cards expressing their consent. President Bush's National Labor Relations Board has twisted labor law to make it almost impossible to organize. Tennessee's "right to work" law prohibits the union shop, allowing "free riders" to get union benefits without paying union dues. The laws are stacked against workers.
No wonder that only about 12 percent of American workers belong to unions -- 7.5 percent of those in the private sector and nearly 36 percent of workers in the public sector. Many in the private sector are especially scared to join unions, because so many people have been fired or blocked for promotions when they do.
Low union membership translates to poverty wages linked to high infant mortality and low high school graduation rates for the working and unemployed poor.
Wary of a possible return to the violence that had convulsed Downtown Memphis one day earlier, National Guardsmen blocked off Beale Street as striking sanitation workers protested on March 29, 1968. "All labor has dignity," Martin Luther King Jr. preached. "You are ... reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages."
The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. joined King at a press conference on March 28, 1968, where they vowed that the sanitation workers' protests would continue. "We know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters," King had told a crowd at Mason Temple days earlier. "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?"
Workers in the United States and across our borders are not enemies. We have a common interest in enforcing the right of workers to organize, so that wages will rise, consumer spending will increase and our economies will move forward.
What does all this have to do with King and his legacy? A great deal.
'All labor has dignity': King's quest for labor rights
In January, AFL-CIO union members from all over the United States gathered in Memphis to remember King and honor sanitation workers Taylor Rogers, Joe Warren, William Ross, Baxter Leach, J.B. Trotter and others who stood up for their rights with union organizer T.O. Jones in 1968.
During a 65-day strike, the sanitation workers' families lived on very little. Memphis police clubbed people senseless and sprayed them with Mace, a blinding chemical made for use in war. Yet the workers kept marching. Until recently, their story was almost lost to history. But increasingly, others across the country want to hear it.
Americans are also coming around to seeing King as more than a civil rights leader who "had a dream." Most people know King died in Memphis, but many now want to know why. What was going on in this city anyhow? Most people don't know King died fighting for the right of workers to organize unions, in one of the most dramatic and significant battles of the 1960s.
King was far more than a dreamer. He said a union is the best anti-poverty program available to poor people with jobs, and he supported unions all his life. He knew most of the major union leaders in the country and recognized that unions had paved the way for the civil rights movement. He always had a black working-class constituency, from maids in Montgomery to teenagers without work in Birmingham to sanitation workers exploited in Memphis. Time and again, King gave voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless.
When King came to Memphis, he shone a beacon of hope, and media attention, on underpaid, overworked laborers for the city of Memphis. "King was like Moses," said striker James Robinson.
"It was just like Jesus would be coming into my life," said striker Clinton Burrows. "I was full of joy and full of determination. Wherever King was, I wanted to be there."
Five weeks into the strike, on March 18, 1968, King delivered an impromptu speech at Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ. More than 10,000 people crammed the auditorium, many overflowing into hallways and stairways, creating the largest indoor mass rally of the civil rights-era South. "All labor has dignity," King preached. "You are reminding not only Memphis but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America."
After passage of the civil rights and voting rights bills in 1964 and 1965, he said, "One era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality."
King came to Memphis in the midst of his Poor People's Campaign, whose goal was to organize the unemployed and desperately poor of all colors in America's ghettoes, barrios, Indian reservations and rural areas. He wanted them to go to Washington to demand that money allocated for the Vietnam war be spent instead to abolish poverty. King left Memphis to focus on the Washington campaign, but when he returned to lead a mass march on March 28, chaos occurred.
Black youth, street people and provocateurs broke out downtown windows with picket signs; the police attacked, randomly beating, Macing and shooting people; one youth died and hundreds went to the hospital.
It was a disaster for King, and the city of Memphis. He returned a few days later, planning to lead a nonviolent march, and gave a brilliant speech to a crowd on the stormy evening of April 3. Under immense pressure from multiple death threats, King called on people to be like the Good Samaritan going down Jericho road. Stop to help a stranger in need, he said, even if it imperils your own life. "The question is not, 'If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?' 'If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?' That's the question."
King lived by that creed and died by it. The next day, an assassin cut him down.
We need to recall King's warning: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Instead of denigrating immigrants, we need to renew King's call to "planetize our movement for social justice" by helping workers in other countries organize to improve conditions so they don't have to emigrate. At home, we need to regain the right to organize at the workplace. We need to strengthen laws to allow organizing, and reignite our own multiracial coalition. We need to return to King's campaign to end war and poverty and support union rights.
This may sound hopelessly unrealistic to some, yet hope is born from large, idealistic goals. Public-sector workers organized effectively because King and others raised their hopes and eventually government became more accepting of their right to a union. King said that organizing is the only sure way for low-wage workers to raise their wages and change their lives. We can still hope that King's larger goal of a "beloved community" is possible.
But it won't happen unless we remember and understand our history. For most of those who lived through the epic 1968 strike, the lesson of the past to the present is clear: Labor rights, human rights and civil rights remain indivisible. "We can get more organized together than we can apart," King told Memphis workers and their supporters.
Rev. James Lawson, a key ministerial leader in the Memphis strike, called it a "watershed moment" that brought the plight of the working poor to the attention of the country. We should remember that moment and honor its legacy.