By Paul Steven Miller, Henry M. Jackson Professor of Law, and Dick Thornburgh, former governor of Pennsylvania and former U.S. Attorney General 

A treaty that took effect in May could benefit one quarter of humanity: the 650 million people, as well as their families, who live with disabilities. The U.N. International Treaty on the Rights of People with Disabilities is also the first international treaty that guarantees the rights of such people to equality and self-determination.

People with disabilities are the world’s largest minority, yet the United Nations reports that only 45 countries have disability rights laws.

The U.S. hasn't signed the treaty, either, but it should.

The U.S. pioneered rights for people with disabilities when Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act and other disability rights laws in 1990. As former political officials of two different presidential administrations, one Republican and one Democratic, we strongly believe that the U.S. should ratify this treaty. We believe that it is consistent with American law. It incorporates many of the principles in U.S. law, such as full inclusion and the right to reasonable accommodation. Disability rights are and should always be a non-partisan issue.

In far too many nations, people with disabilities lack rights to vote, work, marry, own property, sign contracts or retain custody of their children. Ninety percent of children with disabilities in less developed nations receive no education. In every nation, people with disabilities are the poorest of the poor. The U.S. is no different: 70 percent of people with disabilities who want to work remain unemployed, despite the fact that such people demonstrate better retention rates than workers without disabilities.

The treaty will change these statistics. Since the U.N. opened the treaty for signatures just over a year ago, 24 nations have ratified it. An additional 103 nations have signed the treaty, signaling intent to ratify it soon, and commitment to refrain from contradicting its purpose and object.

The treaty enshrines important principles that Americans hold dear: non-discrimination, equal protection under the law and the right to autonomy and independent living in integrated, community settings.

The U.S. pioneered rights for people with disabilities when Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act and other disability rights laws in 1990. As former political officials of two different presidential administrations, one Republican and one Democratic, we strongly believe that the U.S. should ratify this treaty. We believe that it is consistent with American law. It incorporates many of the principles in U.S. law, such as full inclusion and the right to reasonable accommodation. Disability rights are and should always be a non-partisan issue.

The U.S. reluctance to sign this treaty has been painful and puzzling to us. The treaty provides important protections, beyond the specific protections of the American law, which level the playing field for people with disabilities. And we should not be so proud as to think we cannot learn from other countries about even better opportunities for people with disabilities.

We know that our society is richer, and that everyone benefits from including people with disabilities in schools, housing, workplaces, voting booths, houses of worship, public accommodations and every other sphere of life.

Countries that ratify the Convention agree to set up independent monitoring bodies to track treaty compliance, which would help us identify reforms we need to get more Americans with disabilities into the workplace, and to dismantle barriers to independent living in integrated and accessible housing.

Ratification would also help the U.S. stop disability discrimination around the world, thus helping us reclaim our role as champions of human rights. It would help the U.S. focus world attention on those whose rights have been ignored far too long.

By Christopher Parker, UW assistant professor of political science

Obama’s speech in March about race relations demonstrates genuine patriotism.

The senator used Rev. Wright’s comments to highlight African Americans' continuing struggle for the American dream. He discussed slavery, how through segregation and discrimination it ultimately foreclosed on the chances of African Americans. In fact, all blacks have ever wanted is for America to honor its values. Even during World War II, when Jim Crow was vigorously enforced in the South, black southerners were fiercely allegiant to American values (if not practices).

Obama said that even among members of the black middle class, who managed to escape the hopelessness of the inner city, race continues to shape world views, likely through everyday slights in the workplace and other places such as restaurants. Blacks, understandably, remain angry at the persistence of racism.

Obama then turned to class and the resentment harbored by working-class whites who remain angry at blacks’ perceived advantages. For whites, it’s a zero-sum game in which black progress comes at their expense.

In short, Obama suggested, blacks resent whites for continuing racism, and working-class whites resent blacks because they perceive themselves unfairly disadvantaged by programs designed to close the racial economic divide.

True patriots rail against oppression and corruption. They are committed to the common good, not the welfare of a few. In this light, Obama’s speech must be considered patriotic. He addressed anger and resentment of both blacks and working-class whites by emphasizing the promise of America.

Ultimately, Obama’s speech was about working to perfect a union by drawing upon the ideals on which the union was founded. What’s not patriotic about that?

"Obama's Patriotism: Towards a More Perfect Union," by Christopher Parker, UW assistant professor of political science, posted Thursday, April 10, 2008, to blogs.uwnews.org. UW news blogs is a service of uwnews.org, the University of Washington Office of News and Information.

By Michael K. Honey, UW Haley Professor of Humanities

Sen. Barack Obama, in his books and in a recent speech, explains why Americans have been pitted against one another by race, and how to get beyond it. He asks us to "break out of the racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years."

He also offers ways to get beyond race to a greater degree of social and economic justice. He calls on ethnic minorities and white Americans to recognize that we all need the same things -- better health care, better schools, better jobs -- and can get them only by joining to find solutions to our common problems.

Obama calls on us to build a new movement "to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America."

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be proud. Forty years ago, he called for a multiracial coalition to end poverty, racism and war, and called it the Poor People's Campaign. King said our dire situation called for a "planetary movement" for social and economic justice. Above all, King believed in the power of love to transform the individual, and society. "Someone," he said, "must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate."

In the spring of 1968, many of us hoped that a new president and a movement would create new priorities. On April 4 in Memphis, an assassin took King's life. On June 5, another assassin killed Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Both men had called for withdrawal from the Vietnam War and for shifting the nation's spending from military pursuits to creating jobs and ending poverty. Their deaths shattered our hopes.

Instead of moving toward reform, Americans elected Richard Nixon as president. His "secret plan" for peace consisted of seven more years of murderous military escalation. That "surge" resulted in the loss of millions of lives. Nixon began the coded racial appeals that expanded the Republican Party in the South but divided voters along racial lines. His "southern strategy" has prevailed in politics ever since.

King's dreams of a labor-civil rights coalition, a peaceful foreign policy, mitigating racism and ending poverty were destroyed. Now we stand eerily at another crossroads. Our current government's priorities are even more skewed than in 1968. We face the devastating economic and moral consequences of a potentially $3 trillion war; a massive bailout of Wall Street companies and CEOs, and a trillion dollars in tax cuts for the rich that have swelled budget deficits. Government resources for our infrastructure, education, health care and basic human needs continue to dwindle.

Will a progressive reform movement fix what ails us, or will we fall back on another conservative leader who relies on military escalation and "free market" nonsolutions to problems of human need? Will we fall prey to racial slogans and sound bites intended to confuse rather than to clarify? Or will we move America and the world in a better direction?

Sometimes, it seems we have learned little from our history or from King. On the first day of class, I ask students what King was doing when he was killed. Almost none of them know that King died in the midst of a strike for union recognition. They don't know King was one of the labor movement's strongest supporters or identify him with demands for economic justice. They know nothing about his Poor People's Campaign.

On April 3, in his last speech, King said, "I may not get there with you, but I want you to know that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!" Yet we are doing fewer of the things that he said could take us there, and more of those things that he predicted would lead us into a nightmare of violence and economic inequality.

Forty years later, we have a black man running for president, enunciating King's politics of hope for a better world. The challenge he raises is clear: We must create a multiracial coalition for a new kind of country and a new kind of world as if our lives depend upon it. Because they do. Forty years since Memphis, let's hope it is not too late.

"MLK's agenda remains unfinished," by Michael Honey, UW Haley Professor of Humanities, posted Tuesday, April 8, 2008, to blogs.uwnews.org. UW news blogs is a service of uwnews.org, the University of Washington Office of News and Information.

by David Domke, professor of communication and head of journalism

A week ago, a group of University of Washington students traveled to Texas for five days to cover the "primacaucus" — a complicated combination of primary voting and caucusing that had the potential to end both the Democratic and Republican presidential contests on Tuesday, March 4. We thought it would be a grand learning experience, perhaps even a historic one. It was that and more: We saw the future of political journalism in America.

Along the way, we burned a shoe, were embraced by the Houston gay and lesbian community, went to church several times, met feminist icon Gloria Steinem and watched her words get twisted, saw the Clinton campaign literally turn things around overnight, experienced moments of mountaintop exhilaration as well as sleep-deprived exhaustion, and, on the final day, I — the professor on this wild ride — landed in the hospital, from which I am writing via wireless connection.

This is Journalism 2025. And it is good.

The trip to Texas was part of a last push of reporting on the presidential campaign for 16 students who, in recent weeks, had also covered contests in Idaho and Washington. Our forum has been a Web site called Seattlepoliticore, and we've sought to mix traditional reporting practices of verified facts and vetted sources with the kind of first-person commentary common among Internet bloggers.

When we created our site in early February, the students wondered if anyone would read it. A month later, they've posted hundreds of stories, photos, and videos on our site and also been invited to provide material to The Seattle Times, the Idaho Statesman, The Huffington Post, Crosscut, the popular "Texas on the Potomac" political blog of the Houston Chronicle, Texas' largest newspaper, and on the election section of KIRO-AM's Web site. The volume of output by the students has surpassed anything I envisioned and propelled them to become markedly better journalists.

Further, countless others began linking to Seattlepoliticore, and we found our content picked up by bloggers and traditional news outlets from New York to Miami to San Francisco to even Europe. Traffic increased so much and so fast that the site crashed twice within the span of a few days — both times engendering a mixture of unabashed joy and anxiety among the students. More than once while in Texas, the students interviewed people who said they had read things we had written, which made even their prof proud.

In today's politics and media environment, one can be part of the conversation within minutes and on a shoestring budget. We're proof of that.

For example, by the time we stepped off the plane in Texas, we were equipped with a web of contacts — aided by campaign staffers' always-on availability via cell phones and Blackberries, social networking sites such as Facebook, numerous blogs, and the online presence of news organizations. We split into teams and spent days traveling between Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Waco, and other points. The students took with them cell phones, laptops, pocket-size digital cameras, and wireless network cards (the latter have been the envy of several traditional reporters over the past month), which allowed me to talk with them roughly every few minutes, give or take a minute. I may not have been standing next to them, but I was with them every step.

One of those steps burned a hole in student Will Mari's shoe. He and two classmates were in East Austin, interviewing people at an Obama neighborhood event. While talking with the evening's burger-flipper, Obama volunteer Rudy Malveaux, Mari smelled burnt rubber. He looked down and noted that he was standing on a red-hot barbecue coal. He calmly stamped it out and kept reporting. When you've been in a van going 100 mph to get to a caucus in Idaho and now traveled across the country into the heart of Texas, you don't let a little shoe-fire stop you. But you don't disregard it entirely, either. Instead, Mari wrote it into his coverage of the event, providing a personalized, on-the-scene report that typifies journalistic blogging.

The following day, three other students headed to Houston to cover some campaign door-knocking. En route, they called a local contact (developed through a blog forum prior to arrival in state), who suggested the trio head to Montrose, a gathering place for gays and lesbians. The students found the community via GPS, walked into a coffee shop, and started asking about the locals' political leanings.

Soon they were talking with an out-of-state volunteer who was a former Montana state representative who had opposed gay rights and now was an Obama delegate living in Bellingham. Interesting stuff.

But wait, there's more: The volunteer had been Tom Lee when he lived in Montana but now identified as Rebekah Lee. For student journalists down from Seattle, this was like manna from heaven. But it also required sensitivity and top-to-bottom reporting. Time on the Internet verified some claims, and then the students went old school. They called the Montana Legislative Services Division in Helena and had the librarians fax information about the former representative. They tracked down other sources in Montana. Their initiative got them a first-rate story, which is now being picked up around the Web.

The students talked to so many people in Montrose — what the locals called "the gayborhood" — that by the time they left, they were honorary members: The coffee shop packed them food for the road, and there were hugs all around.

For good or for bad, this wasn't detached, objective reporting. But the end result was journalism featured in the mainstream San Francisco Chronicle's blog and alternative outlet The Advocate. Hitting the sweet spot of both is unusual these days but will be common in tomorrow's political journalism.

Hoping to feel similar Houston love, five other students spent Sunday morning, March 2, in church there. Actually, it was multiple churches. Some went to Joel Osteen's mammoth Lakewood Church — just missing Bill and Chelsea Clinton, who had come unannounced to an earlier service. Some went to hear Republican Party candidate Mike Huckabee at a nearby church, and yet others went to Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, a predominantly African-American congregation. The Houston Chronicle featured two of these pieces (here and here; the third is here), and its Washington, D.C., bureau chief, Richard Dunham, told me, "I think you have more people covering the primary than we do." That's what's possible in a new-media environment in which institutions are no longer as important as initiative, and costs are lower than ever.

Meanwhile, in Austin, a contact tipped us off that Gloria Steinem would be speaking, without fanfare, at a local eatery. Two of the students joined a word-of-mouth crowd of 200 or so. Both students took the cue and wrote about it in introspective terms (here and here).

The institutional press took an entirely different approach: It focused on a couple sentences and then offered a misreading of them.

Specifically, the only other reporter (apparently) in the room, from The New York Observer, reported that Steinem had said, "Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and been a POW for eight years. [The media would ask], 'What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive for eight years?'" The words were correct, but the headline over-reached and triggered a firestorm in which Steinem — and by extension the Clinton campaign — was portrayed as mocking McCain's military history.

But then one of the UW students in attendance, Devon Mills, found something interesting when unpacking her gear upon return to Seattle. She had shot three minutes of video during Steinem's address — and she just happened to catch the pivotal words. When she watched the video, she saw that media and pundits had badly misread Steinem's comments. I agreed. So we jointly posted a piece on Seattlepoliticore in which we do what online journalism and bloggers uniquely do: offer a forum in which anyone, anytime, from almost anywhere, can correct the public record. Don't believe us? Fine. Read what we say, watch the video, and join the conversation. That's the future of political journalism.

It's a dynamic that the Clinton campaign has seemingly come to realize, late but perhaps just soon enough. For almost a month, across Idaho and Washington, the campaign's on-the-ground staffers had kept Seattlepoliticore's student journalists at arm's length. Never dismissive, just not welcoming. In contrast, the Obama campaign and the Republican candidates took our phone calls, returned our e-mails, invited us to see their shops. It was a potent contrast that I wrote about on Crosscut. When we did our advance mapping of contacts in Texas, the pattern remained. And on day one, when we were on the ground in the state, the story was the same. But then, just before we wrote the "They Simply Don't Get It" story, the Clinton campaign got it.

On Friday morning, Feb. 29, the Clinton campaign headquarters in Austin had no time for the students, while the Obama office fed us local story angles. But that evening, at dueling rallies in San Antonio, the Clinton campaign treated us with the same respect and access as the Obama camp. The following morning, staffers at the Clinton H.Q. in Austin greeted the students warmly, invited them in, introduced them to people who came through the doors, fed them story ideas, fed them literally, and invited us to see the campaign through their eyes. The shift in posture toward us was astounding — and it stayed like that through the March 4 voting.

Something profound had changed. Perhaps it was a genuine change of heart, a sense of optimism in the campaign's progress against Obama, a renewed energy, a belief that Tuesday really was Hillary's last stand, or a recognition that how one treats the press actually shapes how the press covers the candidate. Regardless, if it continues, I think it's a shift that opens up possibilities for Clinton's candidacy that were unthinkable just a few weeks ago. And it also points to the realities of the new media landscape.

Everyone who walks through the door today is a journalist. She or he might not be driving a news van or carrying a shoulder camera and, indeed, is far more likely to carry a MacBook than a reporter's notebook. It is unlikely to be someone who is 60, white, and male; instead we will see a rainbow of ethnicity, gender, age, and sexual orientation. Video storytelling will be as important as — perhaps more than — written words. Digital media are the new printing press. They allow people to tell stories 24/7/365.

That's what I'm doing as I write this in a hospital room in Austin, which is where I arrived on the morning of March 4 after realizing I had contracted a nasty-but-treatable bacterial infection in my leg. From my hospital bed, with my trusty cell phone and laptop, I went to work with my students covering the day's primacaucus. They were out talking to people, and I was not standing next to them, but I was with them every step. This piece is dedicated to them. They have boldly brought this 40-year-old, old-school reporter into the 21st century of political journalism. The future belongs to the fearless.

"High Tex: A new generation covers the campaign its own way," by UW Professor David Domke, posted Monday, March 10 to blogs.uwnews.org. UW news blogs is a service of uwnews.org, the University of Washington Office of News and Information.

by Michael Honey, UW Tacoma professor of history and labor studies

Editor's note:  Julian Bond, long-time leader in the American civil rights movement, spoke at several University of Washington gatherings on Feb. 6.

I remember Julian Bond first of all as that eloquent advocate of the politics of hope elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965. He and his comrades in the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee had begun breaking down white supremacy by putting their bodies on the line. Because of his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam war, Bond's constituents had to elect him three times before whites in the legislature would let him take his seat. It was SNCC that started the refrain, “Hell no, we won’t go.”

My long-time progressive Seattle friend, Lyle Mercer, reminded me last night that the Washington legislature refused to seat someone in the 1930s because they suspected him of being a Communist. Likewise, the schools and various employers refused to hire Lyle because he had been the co-chair of the UW students for Wallace during the Progressive Party effort of 1948. Radicals always have a hard way to go.

Julian Bond served 20 years in the legislature, was nominated for Vice-President in 1968, and has been a voice speaking truth to power most of my adult life. I think of him as a truth-telling, pragmatic radical, always looking for and finding some path to change. At his UW talk, he inveighed against the Republican Supreme Court which has shattered our commitment to desegregation and the 14^th Amendment by claiming that all operations of government must be color blind. “The ludicrous has become law,” he said. “There are no non-racial remedies to racial discrimination.”

In 1968, the Kerner Commission told us we are evolving into two societies, “one white, and one black, separate and unequal.” Things in some ways have gotten so much better, but most whites still don’t understand that due to the heritage of slavery and segregation, white privilege still counts, it is inherited whether you want it or not. Hence, “as long as race counts, we’ve got to count race,” Bond said.

He cited a litany of ways in which the life chances of the majority of African Americans have shrunk under the Bush regime, at the same time as new paths to prosperity have opened up to a significant group of better-educated African Americans. And while we spend $720 million a day for a fiasco in Iraq, poverty rises in America to the highest level in the developed world. In this dichotomous world, the future is one of both promise and peril, Bond said.

By 2050, Hispanics and African Americans will make up 40 percent of the U.S. electorate. In that context, we can all benefit from the movement’s combination of tactics, from litigation, organization, mobilization. The future is about what all and each of us will and can do to make a better world.

Bond gave a similar message to a group of about 50 graduate students earlier in the day, convened by the Graduate Opportunities and Achievement Program, or GOMAP, under the always delightful and able organizing of Yvette Moy.  James Banks, Nikhil Singh, the students and I joined in an earnest conversation about the future, and we found much to be hopeful about.

Should the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People change its name? When we say colored people, said Bond, we take into account that all people are colored, in our various hues, and that all people of good will are welcome. Everyone can do something, make some choice, to give hope. Yes, we can join together to dig out of the horrific, disastrous mess created in the last seven years by a fundamentally dishonest, militaristic, and wrong-headed regime.

He also said one problem we have is we are falling back on leaders, but what we need in addition is organizers, and mass movements. "Engage your body in social change."

It was a good message to hear in a year when it seems, at last, there may be something to be hopeful about in taking the national political apparatus back from extremist reactionaries who would like to turn government into a profit-making enterprise for their friends, and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

Fittingly, Bond ended his public lecture with a grand quote from the Socialist Party labor advocate, Eugene Debs, imprisoned for refusing to support World War I. On the eve of political primaries and caucuses, Julian Bond gave us a moment to savor a few words of reflection from one of the masters of don’t-give-up, stay-in-the-fight, be-pragmatic, but-don’t-lose-your faith exponents of hope. It reminded me of the best ideals this country has to offer, which come deeply from the history of our own struggles for freedom.

by Christopher Parker, UW assistant professor of political science

Last week, the Chairman of the NAACP, Julian Bond, was on campus. He was here to discuss Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy: where do we go from here? A founding member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),Bond served as its communications director from 1961 to 1966. SNCC, as the student-based arm of the civil rights movement, was instrumental to the success of desegregation in the South, fashioning sit-ins and freedom rides to contest Jim Crow laws.

Later, through voter registration drives, SNCC helped black southerners gain access to the ballot. Bond was so committed to the movement, and his post at SNCC, that he  took temporary leave from his studies at Morehouse College, where he majored in English, to devote more time to the freedom struggle.

Save for a select few who remain with us, with 48 years in the struggle and counting, there isn’t anyone more qualified comment on Dr. King’s legacy than Dr. Bond. He laments that the freedom struggle’s lost the “organizing tradition.” For him, it means engaging people, “going door-to-door…protesting, not just speech-making.” Having said that, he likes what he sees with Barack Obama’s campaign, the ways in which it’s inspired people—especially the young. Yet he wonders whether or not folks will remain engaged after the general election, especially if they don’t agree with the result.

In the final analysis, he seemed cautiously optimistic about what an Obama presidency would do for the country. From what I was able to glean, his words conveyed a sense that Obama has tapped into something, something unseen since the SNCC-sponsored events of 1964. Freedom Summer, an event designed to raise the consciousness of white student volunteers from non-southern states while teaching black southerners how to pass the “literacy exams” required for blacks to vote, brought blacks and whites together for a common cause: realizing the promise of American democracy. An Obama presidency, needless to say, offers the same allure, signaling that we, as a country, may have arrived.

By Michael K. Honey, UW Tacoma professor of humanities

The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. casts a shadow over events in our country, and never more appropriately so than in this electoral season of 2008. In a real sense, King paved the way for Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign of hope. Using the Bible and the Constitution, King argued and demonstrated that ordinary people can change history, by organizing themselves into a coherent force for change.

At the same time, many of the democratic advances of the 20th century are in jeopardy today, none more so than the right to organize unions, without which working people cannot raise their incomes and improve their lives. We have a long way to go before people at their workplace are afforded the constitutional and human rights that the civil rights and labor movements struggled for, and that King died for.

Barney Sellers / Courtesy The Memphis Commercial Appeal National Guardsmen on Beale Street, March 29, 1968

The right to organize is under attack
Many of this year's presidential candidates seem to want to demonize illegal immigrants. Former senator John Edwards, who quit the race last week, is almost alone among them in explaining that our "immigration problem" is actually a labor problem. "Free trade" laws have helped U.S. agribusiness to undersell corn farmers in Mexico, sending them streaming north in search of work; those laws make it easier for multinational corporations to outsource unionized jobs with wages that support a family to cheaper labor markets abroad. Families on both sides of the border are hurt by the catastrophic destruction of the farming economy and well-paying working-class jobs.

In Immokalee, Fla., immigrant fruit and vegetable pickers work six days a week, 12 hours a day, for about $13,000 a year, poverty wages by anyone's standard. Florida's growers have invested millions in a campaign to stop them from getting just one penny per pound more for the crops they pick. In Smithfield, N.C., black, Hispanic and white meatpacking workers get poverty wages while employers fire, harass and intimidate, and federal officers raid the homes of immigrant workers and deport them.

South of our border, Mexican authorities beat up teachers in Oaxaca; Guatemalan authorities kidnap unionists at Coca-Cola plants; Colombian death squads kill hundreds of union leaders. Elsewhere in the world, China too often crushes union organizing.

Repression in the United States is not as severe, but Americans are similarly challenged when it comes to guaranteeing people union rights. In Washington, Republicans in the Senate killed the Employee Free Choice Act last year, which would have allowed workers to unionize if a majority sign cards expressing their consent. President Bush's National Labor Relations Board has twisted labor law to make it almost impossible to organize. Tennessee's "right to work" law prohibits the union shop, allowing "free riders" to get union benefits without paying union dues. The laws are stacked against workers.

No wonder that only about 12 percent of American workers belong to unions -- 7.5 percent of those in the private sector and nearly 36 percent of workers in the public sector. Many in the private sector are especially scared to join unions, because so many people have been fired or blocked for promotions when they do.

Low union membership translates to poverty wages linked to high infant mortality and low high school graduation rates for the working and unemployed poor.

Wary of a possible return to the violence that had convulsed Downtown Memphis one day earlier, National Guardsmen blocked off Beale Street as striking sanitation workers protested on March 29, 1968. "All labor has dignity,"  Martin Luther King Jr. preached. "You are ... reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages."

Jack E. Cantrell / Courtesy of Special Collections, the University of Memphis Libraries The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. (left) and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. joined King at a press conference on March 28, 1968, where they vowed that the sanitation workers' protests would continue. "We know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters," King had told a crowd at Mason Temple days earlier. "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?"

Workers in the United States and across our borders are not enemies. We have a common interest in enforcing the right of workers to organize, so that wages will rise, consumer spending will increase and our economies will move forward.

What does all this have to do with King and his legacy? A great deal.

'All labor has dignity': King's quest for labor rights
In January, AFL-CIO union members from all over the United States gathered in Memphis to remember King and honor sanitation workers Taylor Rogers, Joe Warren, William Ross, Baxter Leach, J.B. Trotter and others who stood up for their rights with union organizer T.O. Jones in 1968.

During a 65-day strike, the sanitation workers' families lived on very little. Memphis police clubbed people senseless and sprayed them with Mace, a blinding chemical made for use in war. Yet the workers kept marching. Until recently, their story was almost lost to history. But increasingly, others across the country want to hear it.

Americans are also coming around to seeing King as more than a civil rights leader who "had a dream." Most people know King died in Memphis, but many now want to know why. What was going on in this city anyhow? Most people don't know King died fighting for the right of workers to organize unions, in one of the most dramatic and significant battles of the 1960s.

King was far more than a dreamer. He said a union is the best anti-poverty program available to poor people with jobs, and he supported unions all his life. He knew most of the major union leaders in the country and recognized that unions had paved the way for the civil rights movement. He always had a black working-class constituency, from maids in Montgomery to teenagers without work in Birmingham to sanitation workers exploited in Memphis. Time and again, King gave voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless.

When King came to Memphis, he shone a beacon of hope, and media attention, on underpaid, overworked laborers for the city of Memphis. "King was like Moses," said striker James Robinson.

"It was just like Jesus would be coming into my life," said striker Clinton Burrows. "I was full of joy and full of determination. Wherever King was, I wanted to be there."

Five weeks into the strike, on March 18, 1968, King delivered an impromptu speech at Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ. More than 10,000 people crammed the auditorium, many overflowing into hallways and stairways, creating the largest indoor mass rally of the civil rights-era South. "All labor has dignity," King preached. "You are reminding not only Memphis but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America."

After passage of the civil rights and voting rights bills in 1964 and 1965, he said, "One era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality."

King came to Memphis in the midst of his Poor People's Campaign, whose goal was to organize the unemployed and desperately poor of all colors in America's ghettoes, barrios, Indian reservations and rural areas. He wanted them to go to Washington to demand that money allocated for the Vietnam war be spent instead to abolish poverty. King left Memphis to focus on the Washington campaign, but when he returned to lead a mass march on March 28, chaos occurred.

Black youth, street people and provocateurs broke out downtown windows with picket signs; the police attacked, randomly beating, Macing and shooting people; one youth died and hundreds went to the hospital.

It was a disaster for King, and the city of Memphis. He returned a few days later, planning to lead a nonviolent march, and gave a brilliant speech to a crowd on the stormy evening of April 3. Under immense pressure from multiple death threats, King called on people to be like the Good Samaritan going down Jericho road. Stop to help a stranger in need, he said, even if it imperils your own life. "The question is not, 'If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?' 'If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?' That's the question."

King lived by that creed and died by it. The next day, an assassin cut him down.

The same cause: Labor rights, civil rights, human rights
We need to recall King's warning: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Instead of denigrating immigrants, we need to renew King's call to "planetize our movement for social justice" by helping workers in other countries organize to improve conditions so they don't have to emigrate. At home, we need to regain the right to organize at the workplace. We need to strengthen laws to allow organizing, and reignite our own multiracial coalition. We need to return to King's campaign to end war and poverty and support union rights.

This may sound hopelessly unrealistic to some, yet hope is born from large, idealistic goals. Public-sector workers organized effectively because King and others raised their hopes and eventually government became more accepting of their right to a union. King said that organizing is the only sure way for low-wage workers to raise their wages and change their lives. We can still hope that King's larger goal of a "beloved community" is possible.

But it won't happen unless we remember and understand our history. For most of those who lived through the epic 1968 strike, the lesson of the past to the present is clear: Labor rights, human rights and civil rights remain indivisible. "We can get more organized together than we can apart," King told Memphis workers and their supporters.

Rev. James Lawson, a key ministerial leader in the Memphis strike, called it a "watershed moment" that brought the plight of the working poor to the attention of the country. We should remember that moment and honor its legacy.

This article initially appeared Feb. 3, 2008 in The Memphis Commercial Appeal.