Today, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, unions and their supporters are holding over a 1000 actions "in solidarity with working people in Wisconsin and dozens of other states where corporate politicians are trying to take away our rights" as outlined at the We are One site.
Why the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death?
Because (and I'm going to quote a chunk from a 2006 post of mine on this topic), Martin Luther King Jr. died in Memphis in 1968 during a labor strike, notably one of public workers -- in that case sanitation workers -- demanding their rights (See this site for more on the Memphis strike). This labor legacy of MLK is not often taught in our schools, but it's worth remembering the fact that in his last months, he considered walking a picketline to be the embodiment of his civil rights dreams:
Martin Luther King Jr. had made a strike of public employees in Memphis a centerpiece of his efforts to launch the "Poor Peoples Campaign" of his final year. You can read more details about the strike at this website commemorating the strike, but it's worth understanding that Martin Luther King Jr., even as he rightly criticized the exclusionary rules of some individual unions, always saw a strengthening of unions and labor as critical to achieving long term justice for African Americans.
This wasn't a late epiphany for Martin Luther King Jr. As he said at the AFL-CIO convention in 1961:
By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a
market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels
of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but
history remembers them...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.--Speaking to the AFL-CIO on Dec. 11, 1961
He similarly attacked anti-union right-to-work laws:
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. It is supported by Southern
segregationists who are trying to keep us from achieving our civil
rights and our right of equal job opportunity. Its purpose is to destroy
labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions
have improved wages and working conditions of everyone.
So when you saw those flickering images of Martin Luther King Jr. talking about having "Been to the Mountaintop" in the days before he died, he was speaking at labor events on behalf of public workers seeing labor rights. And today is a good day to honor that legacy.
For those interested, you can follow the action on Twitter with the hashtag
#april4.