Honoring the Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

Honoring the Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

January 20, 2025 — The following is an except of the keynote speech given by our International President at the Atlanta MLK Prayer breakfast last Friday.

Dr. King called on us to come together with the “fierce urgency of now” to fight for justice. Our calling is now to honor his legacy. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a labor leader; one of the greatest labor leaders the working class has ever known. 

Through his civil rights work, Dr. King sought to lift up hard-working people who, regardless of the effort and sweat they expended in their jobs, were mired in poverty. Not a transient poverty, but a systemic and transgenerational poverty from which most could never expect to escape.

The American Dream is often described as the belief that through hard work and dedication our children will be better off than their parents, generation after generation. But for most of the working class that is not true and we have become all too familiar with the morally wretched term, “the working poor.” In order to solve problems, we must define them. We do not organize because all is well; we organize because capitalism cares nothing for any of us and because it is harder to live with the way things are than to do the hard work we must to change it.

Dr. King was among the first to see and to preach the interconnectedness of civil rights and economic justice. He knew that without ultimately lifting people out of poverty, the achievements of the civil rights movement would be incomplete. He knew that the right to put food on the table was just as important as the right to vote. He knew that the right to sit at a lunch counter would be meaningless to “the working poor” who could not afford to buy lunch.

In his fight for civil rights and economic justice, Dr. King the labor leader expertly invoked many of the tactics of the Labor Movement. He led boycotts and sit-ins, he held marches and rallies, and he walked on picket lines. He organized whole communities of working people to demand change. He built coalitions with religious and community groups. Most of all, he mobilized people to make demands and create change through direct action. Non-violent action.

Few labor leaders have ever employed those tactics more effectively or achieved more far-reaching results than Dr. King did. He fought on his terms, refusing to bend to the violence of hate. When we choose to fight on our terms we can win. And we have contracts to win together right now! Our contract fights and organizing efforts that keep non-union shops from undercutting our jobs and instead get them to the table too to help raise the standards of our careers too - these efforts are all part of living the legacy of Dr. King and the power of solidarity that he called us to build and use.

The March on Washington was billed as a March for Jobs and Freedom. Not just freedom, because freedom without a safe and well-paying job is not true freedom. Freedom without the means to afford adequate housing is not true freedom. Freedom without health care and retirement security is not true freedom. Freedom is not true freedom without the right to demand your boss meet you at the table, regardless of the work you do, the color of your skin, the gender qualities you express, or the people you love.

Dr. King often said that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ In labor we say ‘an injury to one is an injury to all.’ This concept of solidarity applies across all lines that might normally divide us, by race, by gender, by national origin, by religion; you name it. The boss has used those labels to divide us for hundreds of years: to pit workers against one another as a means of control and to suppress wages. They work to divide us to keep us down, and to avoid a real and meaningful showdown between capital and labor.

What transcends that kind of exploitation is class consciousness. Through a sense of working class solidarity, no challenge is too great for us to overcome. Solidarity is a force stronger than gravity, it lifts us up.

Like Dr. King, we are all painfully aware that our work is never done. Dr. King talked of one day reaching the promised land, achieving true freedom and economic justice. While standing with the sanitation workers fighting for justice in Memphis he added. “I may not get there with you.” He knew there were forces aligned against him who wanted him dead. Many find that statement prophetic and dark being that it was the day before he was assassinated, but I like to think of that statement as exhorting all of us to carry on the struggle. He knew that despite the many life-changing accomplishments of the civil rights movement, true freedom, true equality, and true economic justice were still a long way off. He knew that generations of struggle still lay ahead, and that no one person could live long enough to see it through. 

So, when Dr. King said, “I may not get there with you,” it was not said in resignation. No, I believe those words were meant to invoke in all of us our duty to carry on the fight. No one leader, even as great a leader as Dr. King, can be the sole engine of the movement for jobs and freedom. With those words he deputized all of us to take up the fight, to lead, and to carry on. He pushed his powerful spirit of love into all of us to carry on until his dream could one day be reality. And, while we all remember him and wish he were still here among us, we can never simply shrug and walk away from this fight because he’s gone. We must carry on the fight for jobs and freedom for all working people.

Dr. King rallied us by reaching for the mountain top. He didn’t seek integration of just ONE school, he sought freedom in our schools for ALL children. He didn’t seek integration of just ONE lunch counter, he aspired to have us ALL “sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” 

Labor can lead the way. We can be the ones to fulfill the promise of our American Dream.

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