Public Employee Press

Remembering King

"An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was only 26 when he took on the fight for equality which placed him front and center in the Civil Rights movement. Murdered while helping AFSCME Sanitation workers in Memphis, had he lived, on Jan. 15, King would have been 86.

From the moment when Rosa Parks agreed to be the one to refuse to move to the back of the bus in 1955, Dr. King and a cadre of older pastors and preachers became the architects of the nation's largest social justice movement.

The strategy was simple: put feet on the ground to boycott public transportation in Montgomery, Ala.

The grassroots campaign called for involvement, organization and mobilization. In Montgomery most every black church, club and civic group participated. Every African American, man, woman and child, from the elders to schoolchildren, made the sacrifice to not ride Montgomery city buses.

They vowed to walk or car pool, refusing to take these public segregated buses until their objective was met. They covered miles of dirt roads and added hours onto daily trips to and from jobs across to the white section of that segregated city, where many worked as domestics, porters, drivers and laborers.

The boycott continued from Dec. 5, 1955, to Dec. 20, 1956. At the end, the city of Montgomery complied. The first major victory was won. The strategy worked. The movement grew.

For the next 12-and-a-half years, King led freedom's march with the ultimate goal of liberty for African Americans and the poor, to end Jim Crow oppression and segregation.

Freedom fighters

"An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," Dr. Martin King Jr. penned in his open letter from a Birmingham jail. He insisted on civil disobedience and peaceful protest - freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment - to bend the long arc of justice toward humanity and dignity. Dr. King used nonviolence to move the United States to a more just and perfect union. He invited black and white people to put "our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community."

The campaigns of peaceful protests and lunch counter sit-ins to desegregate the South and the effort to register disenfranchised African Americans voters were met with visceral hatred: dogs and fire hoses were turned on children; freedom fighters endured brutal beatings from state troopers. Not a few men and women, black and white people, were martyred - lynched by racists and terrorist Klansmen. Still, the vast majority in America turned a blind eye to injustice.

King pressed the United States to rid itself of an ugly schizophrenia of America portraying itself to the world as the bastion of freedom while acting as the most racist oppressor.

King valued the vital contributions of other leaders in the movement: Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph; Hosea Williams and John Lewis, now a U.S. Congress member; Ella Baker, Dorothy Height and Fanny Lou Hammer; actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, whose financial support was integral to the movement's success, and countless brave men and women of all ages and races whose presence played critical roles in the demand for change.

In 1963, Dr. King delivered his now-famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington where his oratory captivated some 300,000 who gathered that hot August day.

Television gave King an international stage for the issues of civil rights, economic justice and racial equality. In recognition of his Herculean efforts to break America's apartheid system, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

Eventually President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted federal laws that guaranteed minorities and women equality, voting rights and access to better housing and jobs.

Undeterred by hostile resistance, Dr. King responded to a plea from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union for help with striking African American sanitation workers in Memphis demanding equal pay and better working conditions. While helping these union members, on April 4, 1968, Dr. King, 39, was assassinated.

"Dr. King's brilliance in word, truth and deed overcame ignorance," said DC 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido. "His life is inextricably tied to AFSCME, DC 37's parent, and the labor movement. In our continued fight for social and economic justice, King's legacy lives on."