by James Parks, Jan 18, 2008

We all know that Martin Luther King Jr. was a visionary. We know he was a champion for civil rights. But did you know that he also was a strong supporter of unions and workers’ rights from Day One?

As AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff said last year, speaking before the Electrical Workers:

I would submit to you that Dr. King was a trade unionist. He believed in our movement and struggled for our movement. He knew and he preached that civil rights were inadequate without economic rights. Dr. King knew that our economic system allows a few to have too much power and wealth and workers to have too little, so he believed that we have a responsibility to struggle to push down wealth and power from those who have too much to those who have too little. That is why he was a trade unionist. His last great campaign was the Poor People’s Campaign to organize America’s poor to fight for economic justice and dignity.

Click here to read excerpts from Acuff’s speech.

In 1961, King explained his belief that the civil rights and union movements were linked. Speaking before the AFL-CIO Convention that year, he said:

The two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement…Together we can bring about the day when there will be no separate identification of Negroes and labor.

Four years later, he told the Illinois AFL-CIO convention:

Negroes in the United States read the history of labor and find it mirrors their own experience. We are confronted by powerful forces telling us to rely on the goodwill and understanding of those who profit by exploiting us. They deplore our discontent, they resent our will to organize, so that we may guarantee that humanity will prevail and equality will be exacted.

And in 1967, one year before he died, King wrote in his book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? that unions are just as important as business in ensuring economic success for people of color:

Our young people need to think of union careers as earnestly as they do business careers and professions.

This year, the annual AFL-CIO King Day celebration is in Memphis, the site of his last campaign and where he was assassinated while helping city sanitation workers gain a voice at work. (See video of King supporting the sanitation workers.)

Michael Honey points out his book, Going Down Jericho Road (available at The Union Shop Online™), that King always supported the union movement as a means of bringing justice to the workplace. Honey is one of the speakers at the annual King Day celebration.

King had qualities that allowed him to lead a mass movement that joined working-class people to the middle class through the black church. In a remarkable few moments in his first speech at the first mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association, King put the struggle against segregation into a moral and world-historical context. “There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” and have to organize, he said. Unions had set the precedent. “When labor all over this nation came to see that it would be trampled over by capitalistic power, it was nothing wrong with labor getting together organizing and protesting for its rights.”

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