Remembering King's sacrifice for America's workers

Chris Mahin, a union organizer, published this note in 2006 on that year's anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee.

As today is the forty-fourth anniversary of our loss, it's appropriate to remember King, why he was in Memphis on that date, and what he exemplified for the rest of us.

April 4 is one of the saddest days of the year. On that day in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. While many events are held each year to honor Dr. King’s memory, too often people forget – or have never learned -- why he was in Memphis that spring. Dr. King went to Memphis to help striking sanitation workers – and paid for his stand with his life. That makes April 4 an important anniversary not only in African American history (and in U.S. history in general), but in the history of the labor movement as well.

On February 12, 1968, hundreds of Memphis sanitation workers went on strike. At the time, they were making less than $1 an hour and were eligible for welfare. They decided that they had had enough of poor wages, terrible working conditions, and a viciously anti-union mayor.

The workers were members of Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The strike was the culmination of years of mistreatment. The workers worked 12 hours a day carrying garbage with busted, leaking pails. Some of the pails were infested with flies and maggots, and the workers had no place to wash up in the yard when they had to leave the trucks. Some of the workers had no running water when they returned home after work. The workers had no real benefits of any kind.

This dire situation came to a crisis point on Feb. 1, 1968, when the accidental activation of a packer blade in the back of a garbage truck fatally crushed workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker.

Almost 1,400 sanitation workers joined the strike. They shut the city down.

The workers and their supporters marched daily to pressure the mayor and the city council to recognize the sanitation unit under AFSCME Local 1733. The men wore signs which read “I AM a Man,” a slogan that was eventually recognized around the world.

Tension grew in the city as Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb called the strike illegal and threatened to hire new workers unless the strikers returned to work. On February 14, the mayor issued a back-to-work ultimatum for 7 a.m. on Feb. 15. The police escorted the few garbage trucks in operation. Negotiations broke off. The newspapers began to report that more than 10,000 tons of garbage was piling up.

It was in that tense environment that AFSCME organizers appealed to Dr. King to come to Memphis to speak to the workers. Initially, King was reluctant. He was immersed in work preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign. This was a huge undertaking, an effort to bring poor people of all ethnicities to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1968 to protest poverty. But when AFSCME organizer Jesse Epps pointed out that the fight of the sanitation workers in Memphis was part of the same struggle as the Poor People’s Campaign, King agreed.

Once in Memphis, King immediately grasped the importance of what was unfolding there. On his first visit to the city, March 18, he spoke to a crowd of 17,000 people, and called for a citywide march.

On Thursday, March 28, King led a march from the Clayborn Temple, the strike’s headquarters. The march was interrupted by window breaking at the back of the demonstration. The police moved into the crowd, using nightsticks, Mace, tear gas – and guns. A 16-year-old, Larry Payne, was shot dead. The police arrested 280 people, and reported about 60 injuries. The state legislature authorized a 7 p.m. curfew and 4,000 National Guardsmen moved in.

On Friday, March 29, some 300 sanitation workers and ministers marched peacefully and silently from Clayborn Temple to City Hall – escorted by five armored personnel carriers, five jeeps, three huge military trucks, and dozens of National Guardsmen with their bayonets fixed.

In the last days of March, King cancelled a planned trip to Africa and made preparations to lead a peaceful march in Memphis. Organizers working on preparations for the Poor People’s Campaign in other cities were directed to leave those cities and come to Memphis, for it was clear that the Poor People’s Campaign could not be won without winning the fight in Memphis.

On April 3, 1968, Dr. King returned to Memphis. That evening, he gave an extraordinary speech to hundreds of people at Mason Temple. The speech has gone down in history as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Anyone who reads it today will notice that it is an eloquent statement of support for the sanitation workers. (That night, King called them “thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering.”) But it is also a farewell speech, the oration of a man who knew he might not have long to live, and who was searching his soul to make sense of his life, and his place in history.

In the speech, King emphatically rejected the calls not to march again because of an injunction:

“[S]omewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right!”

At the end of his remarks he referred indirectly to the underhanded attempts by racists, the FBI, and other forces to sabotage his leadership and destroy the movement, declaring:

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like everybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

Less than 24 hours after uttering those words, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Urban rebellions broke out in more than 60 cities. In response to pressure from all over the country, the federal government sent Labor Department officials to Memphis to mediate a settlement to the strike.

On Tuesday, April 16, AFSCME leaders announced that an agreement had been reached. The agreement included union recognition, better pay, and benefits. The strikers voted to accept the agreement.

It was a bittersweet end to a long battle. The strike ended in victory, but at a terrible cost, the death of one of the foremost symbols of the fight for justice in that (or any) era. AFSCME’s victory in Memphis inspired other workers in Memphis to join unions, and other employees throughout the South to join AFSCME. The Poor People’s Campaign which Dr. King had been working on when he went to Memphis did take place later in the tumultuous year 1968. As King had hoped, it brought together poor people of all ethnicities to demonstrate in Washington, D.C. – African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and whites.

Given Dr. King’s role in the Memphis sanitation strike and the tremendous community support that the strikers received, perhaps the month of April ought to be a time to remember that not all labor leaders have an official position with a union -- and that labor comes in all colors, and includes both employed and unemployed people. If we hold on to those lessons, we will honor what was won with such great sacrifice in Memphis in April 1968.

King: 'Right to work' laws a 'fraud' on workers

South Carolina has been a so-called right-to-work -- otherwise known as a right-to-work-for-less -- state since adopting its anti-worker law in 1954.

Seven years later, Martin Luther King Jr. commented on so-called 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. . . Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone. Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.

Indeed. King was right then, and he's been proven right in the half-century since then.

According to independent studies conducted by the Economic Policy Institute and the University of Notre Dame, wages in “right-to-work” states are significantly less than in states without “right-to-work” laws. These studies show that the “right-to-work” laws lead to lower wages and drive down the overall living standards in communities.

Wonder why today's educator salaries are so consistently low? King told us why in 1961.

Hooray for our South Carolina, where the poor work hard and wealthy hardly work.

Intelligence plus character, the goal of true education

As schools re-open for classes across the state, it's a good time to recall what some of our wiser thinkers have said and written about education and its purposes. This item was published by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in 1947, in the Morehouse College student newspaper, the Maroon Tiger.

As I engage in the so-called "bull sessions" around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the "brethren" think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end.

It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life.

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one's self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

The late Eugene Talmadge, in my opinion, possessed one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America. Moreover, he wore the Phi Beta Kappa key. By all measuring rods, Mr. Talmadge could think critically and intensively; yet he contends that I am an inferior being. Are those the types of men we call educated?

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character -- that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, "brethren!" Be careful, teachers!

Amen.

Judge J. Waties Waring re-directed South Carolina history

Martin Luther King Jr in 1967, channeling the sentiment of Theodore Parker's writing of 1853, told the 11th annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, "...the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

If judges, whose main interest is justice, affect the course of that arc, few of South Carolina's judges had greater impact on it -- or on state history -- than Judge J. Waties Waring. In a series of decisions issued in the 1940s and 1950s from his bench in Charleston, it might be said that Waring took the arc in both hands and bent it with all judicial force. In so doing, Waring earned himself an important place in South Carolina's history.

But he also earned the permanent enmity of the state's ruling elite, whose responses to Waring continue to punish South Carolina's children today.

TIME magazine took notice of Waring in 1948, publishing this item under the title, "The Man They Love to Hate":

Aug. 23, 1948

For the first time in history, South Carolina Negroes voted freely last week in the Democratic primary; by evening of election day nearly 35,000 had cast their ballots. To old families in the mansions along Charleston's historic Battery, as to most South Carolinians across the state, this was sacrilege. But proud Charleston spent its bitterness on the cause, rather than the effect of this enormous social change. It charged it all up to cold-eyed, 68-year-old Federal Judge J. Waties Waring.

Antique Grandeur.
Judge Waring was one of Charleston's own. He was born of an old and honored family; he married a Charleston girl. He was appointed to the bench January 1942 on the recommendation of the late Senator "Cotton Ed" Smith. Until he was 65, he abided by the insular mores of Charleston's first families and devoted himself to the dusty grandeur of Charleston's traditions.

Three years ago, after 32 years of marriage, he and his wife got a Florida divorce (South Carolina has no divorce laws). The judge married a Connecticut woman. He was instantly ostracized. He did not take it well. Charleston lawyers complained that he grew more vituperative and irascible month by month. But as time wore on, he also grew more liberal in his opinions. His onetime friends did not consider the possibility that an elderly man might gain a new and deeper understanding of justice and the law. They whispered that he was "out to get his revenge."

Last July they were sure of it. Judge Waring ordered the Democratic Party to open its enrollment books to Negroes and permit them "full participation in party affairs." He went even further. When a white man, Senatorial Candidate Alan Johnstone, rose to protest, the judge had him forcibly ejected. He told the crowd of Negroes who jammed his courtroom: "It is a disgrace when you have to come . . . and ask a judge to tell you how to be an American."

He was jeered and denounced. When lightning struck a house next to his summer cottage on Sullivan's Island beach, its owner nailed up a neatly lettered sign: "Dear God, He Lives Next Door." Every man entered in South Carolina's senatorial race vilified him during the campaign. Congressman L. Mendel Rivers sought to institute impeachment proceedings against him, cried: "Unless he is removed . . . there will be bloodshed. He is now in the process of extracting a pound of flesh from the white people of South Carolina because, through his own actions, he has been ostracized from their society."

New Dignity.
Last week there was no bloodshed. South Carolina's Negroes voted quietly. Their votes did not change the result—all the favorites, including blue-blooded, well-heeled U.S. Senator Burnet R. Maybank of Charleston, won handily. Whatever South Carolina thought last week, history might remember crusty, umbrageous Judge J. Waties Waring as a man of cool courage.

Indeed, arch-conservatives in the South Carolina House drafted a resolution to impeach Waring, though it was not adopted.

That 1948 ruling on voting rights and open primaries was controversial enough. But it is Waring's dissent in a 1951 case that earns him attention in an academic law review this summer. Authored by U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel and Hofstra law professor Leon Friedman, the article sees Waring as an exemplar of the independent judiciary.

On June 23, 1951, a little more than 60 years ago, a three-judge federal court panel sitting in Charleston, S.C., issued a majority opinion, upholding the state's rigidly maintained practice of segregating school children on the basis of race. The decision in Briggs v. Elliott, which relied upon the U.S. Supreme Court 1896 precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson, concluded that school segregation was a local matter outside the purview of the federal courts and the American Constitution. What was then little noticed was a passionate dissent by U.S. District Judge J. Waites Waring, an eighth-generation Charlestonian and son of a Confederate veteran. The Waring dissent represented the first instance in the 55 years since Plessy that a federal judge concluded that racial segregation was incompatible with the American Constitution, even if an effort had been made to equalize the segregated facilities. The Briggs lawsuit would eventually wind itself onto the Supreme Court's docket and be consolidated with four other cases under the name Brown v. Board of Education. As they say, the rest is history.

Briggs v. Elliott was the first case filed, tried and appealed to the Supreme Court challenging segregation in public schools. At the time of the trial, in late May 1951, 18 states, including South Carolina, required the operation of racially segregated schools. These laws were a patchwork of state statutes and local ordinances from across the country that enforced a form of racial apartheid then popularly known as "Jim Crow" laws.

The Briggs case was brought by 20 mostly poor African-Americans from the rural community of Summerton in Clarendon County, S.C. The plaintiffs sought an adequate education for their children as a path away from their crushing poverty. As a price for placing their names onto the federal court complaint, many of the plaintiffs had suffered severe retaliation such as loss of their jobs or inability to secure credit. They were, however, undaunted.

On the morning of the federal court trial, a large group of the plaintiffs and their supporters traveled by caravan from Summerton to Charleston to witness what would be one of the most important legal proceedings in American history. Hundreds lined up in the courthouse, on the stairs leading to the courtroom and onto the street for a chance to see and hear the legal attack on their second-class status. They were not disappointed. They observed the testimony of witnesses describing the profound disparities in the educational facilities and resources provided the black and white children of their community. They heard what would become the historic expert testimony of psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark as he described his "doll studies" and opined that segregation stigmatized and injured their children. But what thrilled the plaintiffs the most was the searing cross-examination by their lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, as he questioned the defendants' star witness, ultimately forcing him to admit that, at least in part, his testimony was based on a lifelong belief in racial segregation.

But this was South Carolina, the year was 1951 and the doctrine of Plessy was deeply ingrained in the region's culture. Several weeks after the completion of the Briggs trial, in June 1951, the three-judge panel issued a predictable decision, holding that racial segregation of the schools was a matter of state legislative policy in which the federal courts were "powerless to interfere." What was not predictable was the stirring 20-page dissent by Waring, who concluded that "segregation in education can never produce equality.…Segregation is per se inequality." Waring described segregation as an "evil" that "must go and go now."

Waring's improbable journey on race began after his appointment to the federal bench in 1942. Civil rights cases on his docket slowly opened him to a view of his native city and state that he had never considered as a prosperous attorney and member of elite social societies in Charleston. He started modestly, ending segregation in his courtroom. Beginning in the mid-1940s, Waring issued a series of opinions equalizing the pay of black teachers and requiring the state to admit black students to the University of South Carolina School of Law or to open an equal law school for African-Americans. Waring crossed the racial Rubicon in 1948, when he ordered the state Democratic Party to end its "white primary" and to allow black South Carolinians to vote in the only election that then mattered in the state. Waring soon found himself a social pariah in his native state. Politicians called for his impeachment, death threats were constant and crosses were burned in his yard.

Shortly after issuing his historic dissent in Briggs, Waring turned 70 and became eligible for judicial retirement. He quietly submitted his notice of retirement to the president, and he and his wife moved to New York City. There, he watched as Briggs and other school-segregation cases wound their way onto the Supreme Court's docket. In all of these cases, from Kansas, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and South Carolina, only Waring concluded that segregation in public education, even if equalized, was incompatible with the 14th Amendment. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court, echoing the words and reasoning of Waring's dissent, concluded in Brown that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." On the night of the Brown decision, Walter White, the president of the NAACP, and other civil rights leaders journeyed to Waring's small Upper East Side apartment to thank him personally for the courage and vision of his dissent.

Several years after the Brown decision, Waring and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who authored the Supreme Court's unanimous order, had a chance encounter. Waring told the chief justice, "I was greatly relieved when you decided that Clarendon school case. I'd been very lonely up to that time." Warren responded to the retired Southern jurist, essentially living in exile, "Well, you had to do it the hard way."

It is fitting now — 60 years after the Briggs trial and Waring's remarkable dissent — to note the vital role an independent judiciary played in bringing about an end to government-mandated racial segregation in America. It is also important to remember the ability of one man, willing to sacrifice his good name and comfort for a higher principle, to help to change the course of American history. We should, on this important anniversary, tip our collective hat to Judge J. Waites Waring for his courageous and historic dissent.

South Carolinians generally, and educators in particular -- who know a thing or two about bending the arc of the moral universe, one generation at a time -- have plenty of reason to celebrate and honor the courage of Judge Waring.

American workers accomplished great things when they organized

Monday will be the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's assassination in Memphis. It's worth noting every year, but it's especially worth noting this year, why King was in Memphis on that date: He was there to support city sanitation workers appealing for better wages, benefits and working conditions. The city, we may recall, said it couldn't afford its workers' requests.

King knew, as we know today, that what we CAN afford and what we CHOOSE to afford is often separated by the paper-thin wall of political will. It was illustrated at a rally last month in Columbia that South Carolina is, in fact, a wealthy, wealthy state, when we consider the volume of business done here and the profitability of our corporate neighbors.

In a column published in Memphis's newspaper today, though, the president of the National Education Association focuses on the work done by organized labor to improve life for average working people in America. The president is Dennis Van Roekel and his words speak for themselves, so here they are:

At that time King had already helped win passage of landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he realized that removing legal barriers alone would not bring about equal opportunity and economic justice for African-Americans. He recognized that workers of all races -- including public employees like the Memphis sanitation workers -- would have to use their collective strength to win a fair deal for themselves and their families.

Organized labor played an important role in the civil rights movement. One of the greatest American labor leaders was A. Philip Randolph, who organized African-American railroad workers into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the 1920s. He drew on his experience as an organizer to plan early marches on Washington, D.C., protesting racial segregation and discrimination. These demonstrations paved the way for the 1963 march and rally where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

Unions such as the United Auto Workers also provided financial support to the civil rights movement, and the National Education Association merged with the all-black American Teachers Association in 1966 -- a move that was controversial in many areas of the country, especially the South.

Private-sector workers had won the right to organize and bargain collectively during the Great Depression, but public workers wouldn't gain the same rights until the late 1950s and '60s. Like the civil rights movement of the same era, the emerging power of public workers would improve the lives of African-American families.

Public jobs had long been a mainstay of the black middle class. Workers with education and skills encountered less discrimination in public agencies than in many private companies, and even unskilled black Americans could often find work in sanitation or other public services. That is why King saw the sanitation workers' strike as part of the struggle for civil rights.

Today African-Americans are still more likely than people of other races to work in public jobs. About 17 percent of white workers in the United States are public employees, compared with almost 21 percent of all black workers and 23 percent of black women. Overall, the public sector is the leading employer of black men and the second-leading employer of black women.

We can't ignore that history or those statistics today when we see public workers and their rights under attack in state after state -- including in Tennessee, where the legislature is considering a bill to weaken the bargaining rights of teachers. If King were still alive, he would no doubt say that attacks on public workers are an attack on the African-American middle class -- and he would be right.

The politicians behind these attacks are trying to stoke resentment of public employees and other union members among workers who aren't represented by a union. But no American should resent a neighbor for earning a decent living. Instead, middle-class Americans should be concerned about the widening gulf between an ultra-wealthy elite and everyone else.

In our country today, 5 percent of the people hold almost 64 percent of the wealth, and 1 percent receive almost a fourth of the total income.

The New York Times recently reported that General Electric paid no federal income tax in 2010 despite making $14 billion in worldwide profits. Meanwhile, more people received food stamps last year than ever before, and more than one out of every five children in the United States lives in poverty.

At the time of his assassination, King was fighting to correct this kind of economic imbalance. He knew that unions -- including public unions like the Memphis sanitation workers -- were a critical part of that struggle.

"The labor movement," he said, "was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress." That holds true for all American workers, but especially so for African-Americans.

By the way, for those who argue that labor organizing is a patently evil and unproductive force, consider the news from Aiken today. Rob Novit of the Aiken Standard reports that, after less than a month of negotiating, organized workers at the local Owens-Corning plant won a new agreement and have returned to work:

An employee of the Teamsters Union Local 509 office in Aiken said the company returned to the negotiating table with a revised proposal. Workers approved a new three-year contract Monday and were back at work the next day.

Union representatives could not be reached for comment Thursday. Jason Saragian, an Owens-Corning spokesman at the firm's corporate office in Toledo, Ohio, said the company offer improved the plant's competitiveness and was fair to the employees. He declined to discuss details of the original offer and how the subsequent negotiation differed.

"The offer was modified in a mutually agreeable manner," Saragian said. "We're pleased they ratified it."

Union Local 509 president L.D. Fletcher said after the strike started that the Aiken plant has 90 employees with 75 of them union members. Each plant negotiates separately with its employees, and the large majority of union employees rejected the original contract, he said.

Employees said at the time that the company originally had proposed freezing pensions for workers younger than 60 and reducing salaries of some future employees by $5 an hour. The initial proposal, they said, also included a $1,500 bonus in the first year and raises of 1 percent and 2 percent the next two years.

It would appear that working people can still accomplish great things when they work together.