Lest We Forget: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., won the Nobel Peace Prize (civil & union rights)

[Omaha Steve]

I've been so busy I missed this anniversary yesterday.

http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?history_9_10_14_2011

October 14, 1964 - The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., won the Nobel Peace Prize. Only 35 years old, he was the youngest person ever to receive the award. In addition to leading the civil rights movement, King was an outspoken advocate for worker rights, particularly for the underrepresented in society. His policy of civil disobedience proved effective not only for African-Americans seeking a seat at a white-only lunch counter in the 1960s, but for miners struggling for justice in the Pittson Coal strike of the late 1980s. Nonviolence, King said, “is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.”






The Montgomery Bus Boycott
In 1955, the black citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, inspired by the arrest of Rosa Parks, who refused to give her seat to a white man, began a 13-month boycott of the city bus system. The strike was coordinated by the Montgomery Improvement Association, with King as its president.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1704734,00.html#ixzz1atiARJWB


http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-06-04/news/8902060674_1_miners-coal-pile-pittston-coal-group

Snip: Almost every day since the strike began, state troopers have arrested strikers and their supporters for sitting down in front of coal trucks entering or leaving the Pittston mines and processing plants. There have been more than 2,200 arrests so far.

Suddenly, men and women in an area not noted for its sympathy with the civil-rights movement speak of their kinship with Martin Luther King Jr.

``This is just like the movement in the `60s with the colored people trying to get their rights,`` said Carson Wise Jr., a miner.

The strikers also have traveled by the busload to banks that lend money to Pittston, offices of the company`s directors and the company`s Greenwich, Conn., headquarters to engage in ``informational picketing.``

The nonviolent approach is smart public relations for a union that has lost half its members in the last decade.

``We`re in the land of the giants and we`re the Smurfs,`` said Marty Hudson, the strike coordinator, a former miner whose groomed good looks and white Oxford shirts would disguise him as a yuppie if it weren`t for his chewing tobacco. ``We`ve got to get the support of the communities to win, and we can`t get it with violence.``

http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQr8Vuh3N6msV7zqJ1zGKv2VHBnE84DwKcLdMbQHi7Fy1EGiMZqWQ