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 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 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.