By Nathan Newman
As we celebrate Martin Luther King
Jr. weekend, it’s worth remembering that his legacy was based firmly in the
labor and the socialist movements of the 20th century. It takes nothing away
from King to highlight how his work built on those movements and his voice was
magnified by his association with them.
Martin Luther King Jr. was
recruited in Montgomery by a labor organizer, gave his most famous speech at a
DC rally funded by labor unions, was bailed out of a Birmingham jail with union
dues and would die in Memphis fighting for a union.
E.D. Nixon and Montgomery
Most people know at this point that
Rosa Parks was not some random woman sitting down on a bus because she was
tired, but was a civil rights activist in the Montgomery community who had
become chapter secretary of the local NAACP chapter. Less known to many
is Edgar Daniel (“E.D.”) Nixon who was a long-time leader of the
NAACP chapter and who in fact launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott and recruited
the young Martin Luther King Jr. to help lead the campaign.
Nixon was born in 1899 and with
little education had become a Pullman car porter and in 1928 joined the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union, the first union led by an African
America, A. Philip Randolph. Nixon would later organize the Montgomery branch
of the union and lead it for many years. From that labor platform, Nixon would
build both the local NAACP chapter and then the Montgomery Improvement Association
(MIA) which
would be the launchpad for Martin Luther King’s career.
Nixon in Montgomery was a microcosm
of the role A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood would play in supporting the
civil rights movement across the nation. Partly because the porters became a
bulwark of the black middle class with decent union wages and partly because
their ability to travel made them an ideal network for communication among
black activists across the country, the Brotherhood were the quiet bulwark of
civil rights work, especially during the early years of the 20th century.
A Philip Randolph and the March on
Washington
Randolph is probably the most important civil rights
leader of the
20th century along with Martin Luther King Jr., yet many people don’t even know
his name. Originally a disciple of Eugene Debs in the Socialist Party in the
1910s, Randolph ran the black magazine The Messenger associated
with the Party and would run as a Socialist Party candidate for New York State
Controller in 1920 and Secretary of State in 1922.
But it was in his role as President
of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which he was elected to in 1925,
where he would make his mark. The Brotherhood would become the first black-led
union to join the American Federation of Labor in 1935 and, through bitter
struggles, the union would eventually achieve a contract with the Pullman
Company in 1937 that dramatically raised wages and improved work conditions for
the thousands of porters at the company.
But Randolph would achieve national
fame when he was chosen leader of the National Negro Congress, a coalition of
civil rights organizations, and in 1941 threatened to lead a massive march on
Washington by black Americans to protest discrimination in defense contractors
gearing up for World War II. President Roosevelt agreed to create Fair
Employment Practices Committee to stop employment discrimination in wartime
industries, a temporary measure that would still be the prototype for the Civil
Rights Act of 1964. By threatening to lead black youth in resisting the draft,
he would push Harry Truman to finally desegregate the U.S. army in 1948.
Randolph would work closely with
King after the Montgomery Bus Boycott and in 1963, he along with his lieutenant
Bayard Rustin (a long-time socialist activist himself who would be named
chairman of the Socialist Party in 1972), would organize the “March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” where Martin Luther King Jr. would deliver
his “I Have a Dream” speech.
One of the key funders of the March
on Washington, including doing much of the organizing in union locals around
the country, would be the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, led by Walter Reuther,
the only prominent white speaker at the march. Reuther himself had come out of
the Socialist Party in the 1930s when he became a prominent organizer in the
UAW, eventually becoming President of the union in 1946. In the post-war
period, he would become one of key institutional supporters of the civil rights
movement. When Martin Luther King Jr. challenged Bull Connor in Birmingham and protesters,
including masses of children, filled the jails, it was Reuther who worked with
other labor leaders to provide the large amounts of bail money needed to get
them released.
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Jerry Wurf and the Memphis Strike
Most people have seen clips of
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I’ve been to the Mountaintop” speech the night before
he died in Memphis, but few remember he was there to support a strike of
sanitation workers organized by the American Federation of State, County and
Municipal Employees (AFSCME). It was a tough struggle of black workers caught
in the whirlwind of conflicts between King and the emerging black power
movement, but at its heart it was workers standing up and saying, as their
picket signs said, “I Am a Man” to a white establishment that sought to deny
them basic dignity.
Sparked by the death of two black
sanitation workers crushed in their truck, the Memphis strike was the
culmination of organizing by Local 1733 of AFSCME which had been struggling for
years to gain a union contract with the city of Memphis. And Memphis in turn
was a southern beachhead of work by AFSCME across the nation to demand that
urban municipal workers be paid a decent wage.
AFSCME was led then by Jerry Wurf,
a socialist who would gain leadership of the New York local of AFSCME in the
1950s and the Presidency of the national union in 1964. Long before he became
head of AFSCME, Wurf had worked to set up the first chapter
in New York of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and would strongly
support the Freedom Rides down south from that position. He had supported
Martin Luther King Jr. beginning in his time in Montgomery and would continue
to be a supporter until MLK’s death. Wurf was arrested himself during the
Memphis strike and was released just days before King’s murder. Wurf would
remain one of the most prominent radicals in the labor movement’s leadership
one of the main union leaders who helped launch the Democratic Socialist
Organizing Committee (DSOC) in 1973, the forerunner of today’s Democratic
Socialists of America.
Martin Luther King on Labor and
Socialism
The media tends to dwell on Martin
Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and ignore most of what he said on
economics and inequality. But King was always clear on the connection between
strong unions and a strong civil rights movement; he would argue:
Negroes are almost entirely a working people…That is why Negroes
support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why 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.
He argued anti-labor “right to work
laws” were designed “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.”
In his later years, King would
become an avowed socialist, saying to aides , “we are saying that something is
wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe
America must move toward a democratic socialism.” When he testified before
Congress in 1966, he talked about economic inequality and capitalism driving
the hopelessness of the urban black poor. “We can’t end slums in the final
analysis without seeing the necessity to take profit out of slums,” he told the
Senators that day. His turn to building the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968 was specifically
about moving the civil rights movement toward fighting for economic
transformation of society- and he had Michael Harrington, who would become the
main leader of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, draft the Poor
People’s Manifesto that outlined the campaign’s vision.
All along his journey, Martin
Luther King Jr. had been supported by the wing of the labor movement rooted in
the socialist traditions of the 20th century and he in turn would increasingly
speak out in support of that vision, whether opposing profiteering in American
ghettos, denouncing the Vietnam War’s role in upholding global inequality or
standing with labor unions in demanding justice for workers.
So don’t just celebrate the
sanitized “secular saint” version of King promoted by the media but remember
his radical vision - and the socialist labor activists that strengthened his
work and amplified his voice throughout his career.
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