"I am a Man" - Video, and The "We are One" events

Monday April 4, 2011

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1. Video 

I Am A Man: Dr. King & the Memphis Sanitation Strike

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBDgH435oaU

On the 40th Anniversary of the assasination of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., a reminder that the civil
rights leader died while supporting a struggle to form
a union. Produced by American Federation of State,
County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

"Heart of racism is that a man is not a man."

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2.
We Are One: Remembering Martin Luther King's Struggle for Labor Rights

Monday 4 April 2011

by: Michael Honey , History News Network [3]

Martin Luther King Jr. on the march to Montgomery,
1965. (Photo: Eliel [4]) Do you like this? Click here
to signup for free email updates from Truthout.

"It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation
and receive starvation wages.  And I need not remind
you this is our plight as a people all over America." -
Martin Luther King in Memphis, March 18, 1968

April 4 marks forty-three years since an assassin
killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis.  That
date has special meaning this year.

"We Are One" events all over the U.S. are fighting for
collective bargaining rights, and more broadly, a
reversal of the current priorities and direction of
events.  The connection of today's union rights battle
to King's legacy is clear.  The strike of Memphis
sanitation workers revolved around Mayor Henry Loeb's
refusal to grant collective bargaining rights and union
dues collection.

These are the same rights that Governor Scott Walker
just took away from public employees in Wisconsin. 
Like Loeb, he knows this is a good way to kill a union.
 Who would choose to belong to and pay dues to a union
that cannot represent them at the bargaining table?

People across the country today are protesting the
Republican attempts to utterly destroy the unions. 
They are virtually the only group that still has the
power to stand up against the power of organized money.

King supported unions from his earliest college days
and called them the "first anti-poverty program." 
Unions provided King with staunch allies and provided
his greatest financial support in the Montgomery bus
boycott, the Birmingham movement, the March on
Washington, and other battles.

Mainly because of King's sacrifice, the sanitation
workers in Memphis won their strike.  Their union, the
American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME), now represents millions of
government workers, including many African Americans
workers in the District of Columbia.  Unionists regard
King as an honorary member and practically a founder of
AFSCME.

That's exactly the union Republicans want to kill.
AFSCME and a few other large unions provide the only
major counter weight to corporate money in elections. 
Kill the unions, and you cripple the Democrats and the
ability of working-class folks to resist the political
power of organized money.

While the Arab world struggles in pro-democracy
movements, we in the U.S. are struggling to keep the
union rights that King and others died to achieve. 
Unions are an endangered species, as they were in
Memphis before King came to that city.  Those of us
rallying today feel we are making King's legacy real in
our own lives.  And we feel Americans need to reframe
their understanding of King and his legacy.

Many think of King as purely a civil rights leader.  In
addition, we need to recognize his fierce advocacy of
labor rights and economic justice.  A child of the
depression, King always expressed solidarity with poor
people.  They included his neighbors, his parishioners,
and his family.  His father fled sharecropping and
arrived in Atlanta with only a few dollars; his
grandparents had worked hard laboring jobs; three of
his great-grand parents were slaves.

King was not only a leader for civil rights, which he
called "phase one" of the freedom movement.  "We Are
One" demonstrations on April 4 remember King's launch
of "phase two," his Poor People's Campaign demanding a
shift in government priorities from warfare and tax
cuts for the rich to creating jobs and enhancing health
care, housing and education.

King had been on this path for a long time, speaking at
union meetings all over the country.  He told the
Illinois AFL-CIO in 1965, "It is a constitutional right
for a man to be able to vote, but the human right to a
decent house is as categorically imperative and morally
absolute as was that constitutional right.  It is not a
constitutional right that men [and women] have jobs,
but it is a human right."

King also warned the AFL-CIO at its national convention
in 1961 that an alliance of business and right wing
politicians in the future would threaten "everything
decent and fair in American life."  They are doing it
now.

On this April 4, we should remember King's words to the
Memphis sanitation workers:  "All labor has dignity...
You are going beyond purely civil rights to questions
of human rights."  There is no better time than the
present to follow King's lead and stand up for the
rights of working and poor people.

Michael Honey is editor of King's labor speeches, "All
Labor Has Dignity" (Beacon) and author of "Going Down
Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike: Martin Luther King's
Last Campaign" (Norton).

___________________________________________

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