On Anniversary of King’s Death, Recommit to Helping the Poor

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/04/04/on-anniversary-of-king%e2%80%99s-death-recommit-to-helping-the-poor/

On Anniversary of King’s Death, Recommit to Helping the Poor

by James Parks, Apr 4, 2007

The issues on which Martin Luther King Jr. was working when he was killed 39 years ago today in Memphis are as relevant now as they were then.

King went to Memphis in April 1968 to lend his support to a strike by the almost all-black city sanitation workers, many of whom were standing up against white authority for the first time in their lives and who were demanding recognition of their union, AFSCME Local 1733.

The Memphis sanitation workers strike was about basic human dignity, says Michael Honey, author of Going Down Jericho Road (available at The Union Shop Online™), which chronicles events in the strike and King’s assassination. Writes Honey:

King came to Memphis for a simple reason: He was trying to organize poor people, and here were poor people organizing themselves. He had to be there.

As King said the night before his death, addressing the strikers.

You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor. So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth.

King, a longtime supporter of unions, and the sanitation workers recognized the importance of union membership to lifting black workers out of poverty, says AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Bill Lucy, who was one of the organizers working with the Memphis strikers in 1968.


Martin Luther King Jr. addresses striking sanitation workers the day before he was killed in Memphis.

As Lucy says today:

The workers in the Memphis public works department and I think workers across the South recognized that their future was tied to their ability to organize a union and have a union represent them in the areas of wages, hours and conditions of employment. So no matter how bad the situation was, it would be worse if they were not able to form a union. And as bad as the strike got and as tough as life was, they were not about to give up until they achieved recognition of a union.

Dr. King’s involvement showed he recognized the fact that you had people who worked every single day and yet were not able to raise themselves out of poverty…and that the civil rights struggle and the struggle for workers’ rights are intertwined.

Just in case there’s any doubt that the problem of the working poor still exists, McClatchy Newspapers recently reported the percentage of poor Americans living in severe poverty reached a 32-year high in 2005. Nearly 16 million people were living in severe poverty—families of four with two children making do on less than $9,903 a year or individuals living on less than $5,080.

FULL story at link.

[pinto]

1. Thanks for the post. Well done article from Mr. Parks. - His auto-bio:

James Parks

My first encounter with unions was at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when my colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. I saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. I am a journalist by trade, and I worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. I also have been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. My proudest career moment, though, was when I served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections.

http://blog.aflcio.org/?page_id=289

[CrazyOrangeCat]

2. Superb post. K&R