“Black History is American history,” wrote Colman Elridge, the Kentucky Democratic Party’s first Black chair, in recognition of this year’s Black History Month.
Black history is also labor history. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the country’s greatest civil rights leader, saw the civil rights and union movements as natural allies.
King was murdered on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn., where he had gone to stand in solidarity with striking sanitation workers of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1733. The night before he was killed, he delivered his immortal “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech at Mason Temple in support of the strikers.
The late Louisville labor and civil rights activist Augusta Y. Thomas and five other women from different Derby City unions also went to Memphis to back the strikers. Thomas spent 52 years in the American Federation of Government Employees, capping her union career as AFGE’s Washington-based national vice president for women and fair practices.
The six women heard King’s speech. Staying in first floor rooms at the Lorraine Motel, they heard the assassin’s rifle shot that fatally wounded King, who was standing on a second floor balcony. (The motel is part of the National Civil Rights Museum.)
“Dr. King believed to his core that civil rights and labor rights went hand in hand, part of the same struggle,” wrote AFSCME President Lee Saunders in a blog on his union’s website. The blog is titled “Dr. King’s last campaign was an AFSCME campaign.”
Added Saunders, “He was in Memphis to join the sanitation workers’ fight because he knew that racial justice and economic justice are fundamentally linked.”
At the 1961 AFL-CIO convention, King spoke of the alliance between the civil rights and labor movements: “There are pitifully few Negro millionaires, and few Negro employers. Our needs are identical with labor’s needs – decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor.”
In a 1962 letter to the Amalgamated Laundry Workers, he wrote, “As I have said many times, and believe with all my heart, the coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined.”
In his 1967 book, Where do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? King wrote that “the labor movement, especially in its earlier days, was one of the few great institutions where a degree of hospitality and mobility was available to Negroes. While the rest of the nation accepted rank discrimination and prejudice as ordinary and usual ... trade unions, particularly in the CIO, leveled all barriers to equal membership. In a number of instances Negroes rose to influential national office.”
King often spoke out against state “right to work” laws, legislation that permits workers at a unionized jobsite to receive union-won wages and benefits without joining the union or paying the union a service fee to represent them. Kentucky and 25 other states are RTW states, but Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wants to make all states RTW. The Republican has again introduced a National Right to Work Act.
Also in 1961, King warned, “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone. ... Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer, and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.”
In his 1961 AFL-CIO address, King also said, “the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.” One of the first RTW proponents was Vance Muse, a Texas tycoon and virulent racist “who despised the doctrine of human equality represented by unions,” wrote Roger Bybee in The Progressive.
The Texas Legislature passed a right to work law in 1947. Kentucky followed 70 years later.
Muse, who also was rabidly anti-Semitic, saw “right to work” as a twofer: RTW would help smash unions, and help maintain segregation and white supremacy in Texas and elsewhere in the Jim Crow South, which included border state Kentucky. Muse also favored an RTW amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In 1936, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for a second term, Muse started the reactionary, racist, and anti-semitic Christian American Association in opposition to FDR’s New Deal. Muse allied his group with the Ku Klux Klan.
The year before, a Democratic-majority Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act. Also known as the Wagner Act, the legislation gave workers legal protection to organize and bargain collectively.
“The appallingly racist views of Muse and his Christian American Association coincided with the mentality of corporate managers dedicated to holding down wages and maintaining the tight control over workers dating back to the days of slavery,” Bybee wrote. “The CEOs of the 1930s recognized that Muse’s segregationist ‘right to work’ concept would break up unified worker efforts to claim the rights granted under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.”
Like Thomas, the late W.C. Young of Paducah was a national labor and civil rights leader. He said he never went anywhere without his union card and his NAACP card in his wallet. NAACP, American Federation of Teachers, and Kentucky Education Association retiree cards are tucked in my wallet.
Young said civil rights leaders “have always known that with the labor movement they have a strong friend with clout.” Civil rights leaders know that’s still true today.
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