Martin Luther King Jr. was right. Civil rights and labor movements natural allies | Opinion

Berry Craig
Opinion Contributor

“The labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. aptly observed in remarks at the 1961 AFL-CIO convention.

That's still true.

Anyway, it’s no coincidence that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is clinging like grim death to the filibuster to derail the PRO Act and to stall legislation that would override GOP-sponsored state laws that deliberately make it harder for people of color to vote and vest control over vote counting and election certifying to partisan bodies such as appointed election commissions.

"The heirs of Jim Crow are weakening the foundations of our democracy," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted. McConnell got an F on the latest NAACP Civil Rights Federal Legislative Report Card. 

“The filibuster is a relic that has been used to maintain white supremacy,” said Brian Clardy, a Murray State University historian. “We are seeing that come back in a very rabid form.”

Background:What is the filibuster? A look at the Senate’s consequential quirk and debate on its future

He said Republican laws that suppress minority voting “represent the first time since the Jim Crow Era that states — and not just in the South — have moved to actively disenfranchise whole populations for nefarious reasons.”

The architects of the racist southern Jim Crow system were conservative southern Democrats. Because everybody is supposed to be equal in a union, they feared unions would undermine white supremacy. Hence, they never missed a chance to race-bait and labor-bait. 

McConnell is all in for those neo-Jim Crow voter laws. He demonizes the Protecting the Right to Organize Act — PRO Act for short — which would finally give unions a fair shake under labor law, which tilts sharply toward management.   

Read more::Mitch McConnell: Don’t believe the Democrats’ Big Lie about 'Jim Crow 2.0'| Opinion

The AFL-CIO supports the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021 and the Freedom to Vote Act. The measures "would protect the right of every American to cast our vote and have that vote counted," said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, who called the two bills "a desperately needed federal response to the attacks on voting rights happening in state legislatures all across the country.”

Such attacks from the GOP hearken back to segregationist southern Democrats who fiercely opposed federal civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though the bill ultimately passed after a filibuster that consumed 60 Senate working days.

The AFL-CIO backed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Two years before, labor activists, notably United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, were prominent in King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he delivered his immortal "I Have a Dream" speech.

King saw the civil rights and labor movements as natural allies. “Our needs are identical with labor's needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community,” he also said at the 1961 convention. King saw the civil rights and labor movements as natural allies, saying their needs were the same. 

"The coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined.”

In a 1962 letter to the Amalgamated Laundry Workers, King reiterated, “As I have said many times, and believe with all my heart, the coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined.”

Berry Craig is a professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community College in Paducah and an author of seven books and co-author of two more, all on Kentucky history.

Added Shuler: “In 2020, Americans raised our voices and cast our votes to send representatives to the Senate who will advance a bold legislative agenda. It is absolutely wrong that a minority of senators have the power to block the expressed will of the people. To save American democracy, we need democracy in the U.S. Senate."

Berry Craig is a professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community College in Paducah and an author of seven books and co-author of two more, all on Kentucky history.

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