In 1968, a united black community in
Memphis stepped forward to support 1,300 municipal sanitation workers
as they demanded higher wages, union recognition, and respect for black
personhood embodied in the slogan “I Am a Man!” Memphis’s black women organized
tenant and welfare unions, discovering pervasive hunger among the city’s poor
and black children. They demanded rights to food and medical care from a city
and medical establishment blind to their existence.
That same month, March 1968, 100 grassroots
organizations met in Atlanta to support Martin Luther King’s dream of a
poor people’s march on Washington. They pressed concrete demands for
economic justice under the slogan “Jobs or Income Now!” King celebrated the
“determination by poor people of all colors” to win their human rights.
“Established powers of rich America have deliberately exploited
poor people by isolating them in ethnic, nationality, religious
and racial groups,” the delegates declared.
So when King came to Memphis to support the
strike, a local labor and community struggle became intertwined with
his dream of mobilizing a national coalition strong enough to reorient
national priorities from imperial war in Vietnam to domestic
reconstruction, especially in America’s riot-torn cities. To non-poor
Americans, King called for a “revolution of values,” a move from
self-seeking to service, from property rights to human rights.
King’s assassination—and the urban
revolts that followed—led to a local Memphis settlement that
furthered the cause of public employee unionism. The Poor
People’s March nonviolently won small concessions in the
national food stamp program. But reporters covered the bickering and
squalor in the poor people’s tent city, rather than the movement’s detailed
demands for waging a real war on poverty. Marchers wanted guaranteed public
employment when the private sector failed, a raise in the federal minimum wage,
a national income floor for all families, and a national commitment to
reconstruct cities blighted by corporate disinvestment and white flight. And
they wanted poor people’s representation in urban renewal and social service
programs that had customarily benefited only businesses or the middle
class. King’s dreams reverberated back in the movements that had risen him up.
It is widely believed that King’s deep
dedication to workers’ rights and international human rights came late in life,
when cities burned, Vietnamese villagers fled American napalm, and King faced
stone-throwing Nazis in Chicago’s white working-class inner suburbs. But King
began his public ministry in Montgomery in 1956, dreaming of “a world in which
men will no longer take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to
the classes.” He demanded that imperial nations give up their
power and privileges over oppressed and colonized peoples struggling
against “segregation, political domination, and economic
exploitation”—whether they were in South Africa or South Alabama.
King’s commitments to economic justice
and workers’ rights are becoming more widely appreciated today as we
continue to confront all of the unresolved challenges King confronted in
his day.
Beyond Civil Rights
Around 1964, King announced that the
movement had moved “beyond civil rights.” Constitutional rights to free
assembly, equality in voting, and access to public accommodations had marched
forward with little cost to the nation, he said. Human rights—to dignified
work, decent wages, income support, and decent housing for all
Americans—would cost the nation billions
of dollars. In other speeches, however, King recognized that human rights
and civil rights were bound up with each other, part of a “Worldwide Human
Rights Revolution.”
The practical experience of building a
movement had already made these connections. In Montgomery’s struggle to
desegregate bus seating, for example, King heralded the American “right to
protest for right,” but discovered that it was inseparable from the human
rights to work and eat. Why? Hundreds of African Americans were fired or
evicted or denied public aid for expressing themselves politically, and King
was intimately involved in campaigns for their material relief. This pattern
continued throughout the 1960s. The southern struggle for rights became a
struggle against poverty long before Lyndon Johnson’s wars in Vietnam and on
poverty.
Similarly, in New York City in 1959, King
joined A. Philip Randolph and Malcolm X in supporting the white, black and
Puerto Rican workers of New York’s newly organized Local 1199. Over 3,000
hospital workers—laundry workers, cafeteria workers, janitors
and orderlies—struck seven New York private hospitals. At the bottom of
the new service economy they were legally barred from collective
bargaining; excluded from minimum wage protections and unemployment compensation;
and denied the medical insurance that might give them access to the hospitals
where they worked. Harlem’s black community rallied to their defense. King
cheered a struggle that transcended “a fight for union rights” and had become a
multiracial “fight for human rights.”
Today We Continue the Struggles
King’s commitments to economic justice
and workers’ rights are becoming more widely appreciated today as
we continue to confront all of the unresolved challenges
King confronted in his day. Joblessness is still pervasive under the
official unemployment statistics, and wages remain too low to lift
millions of people out of poverty. Conservative politicians and
globalizing corporations have relentlessly chipped away at union rights
and workplace safety. Tattered safety nets have become even shoddier for
poor people who are not capable of earning. Forty-seven million
Americans are, medically, second-class citizens. Unequal landscapes
of wealth and opportunity in housing and schools still make the words
“American apartheid” a dirty but accurate epithet. And again, in a
different part of the world, our military wages a war of empire cloaked in
robes of democratic idealism. On the right, complacent religious
leaders preach family morality and personal responsibility, while neglecting
our collective moral commitments to materially supporting “the least of
these.” But across the country too, citizens are uncovering stones of hope
and finding new democratic determination. We have come a long way, but we
have a long way to go, as King would say. Lost ground and shattered dreams
are bearable, he would have preached, as we continue the struggles for
multiracial democracy, economic justice, and human dignity that were begun
long ago, under even more challenging circumstances than we face
today.
Thomas F. Jackson is Associate Professor
of History at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and author of the
prizewinning From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr. and the
Struggle for Economic Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)
Reposted from Democratic Left
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