AFL-CIO in Memphis, Tennessee, Remembers Dr. Martin Luther King

Forty years ago this year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. arrived in Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers who were looking for a ten cent an hour increase in their wages. The labor union, the AFSCME and Rev. Joseph Lowery who pastured the Centenary United Methodist Church had called for King to come to Memphis and do something about the evolving situation.

When King arrived he was met with a city mired in racial discord. He had been to Memphis several times before but this visit was different. It would be King's last trip as he was assassinated hours before he was to make another speech at Mason Temple just a day after declaring to the future of black people all over the country that he had been to the mountaintop. King's work in race relations and civil rights has sometimes overshadowed the impact his work in labor relations has meant to unions and poor people.

With that reality in mind, the AFL-CIO sponsored a conference this week on the impact of King on race and labor at the Hilton Memphis. The opening night of the conference saw Rev. Jesse Jackson who was with King when he died speak. The following day, Rev. Lowery is to speak and then AFSCME treasurer/secretary Bill Lucy would take the podium.

Committed to racial diversity, the AFL-CIO has made a significant commitment to diversity. Over thirty percent of union members are minorities and over forty-three percent of the union membership is female members. This came in response to two studies underwritten by the AFL-CIO in which minorities and women expressed that barriers impeded their progress and participation in union leadership and vision development. These two studies, Overcoming Barriers to Women in Organization and Leadership and Overcoming Barriers to People of Color in Union Leadership set the framework for what the AFL-CIO calls the push to full participation by its membership.

With the commitment to what they call Resoluntion #2 which stipulates that: union delegations at the 2009 convention reflect the demographics of its union members before being seated, that central labor councils and federations must put a plan in place to develop mixed leadership teams, additionally affiliated organizations would be encouraged to make a commitment to the AFL-CIO's diversity principles while also putting guards in place to make way for minorities and women to be trained and promoted to more significant leadership roles within the organization.

The Martin Luther King Holiday Observance has important significance as Memphis and America are facing strikingly similar issues today as it did forty years ago when King came to Memphis. With war, poverty, education and wealth creation in particular communities the hotbed issues very little has changed which Rev. Jesse Jackson alluded to in his speech at the Hilton Memphis hotel on Thursday evening. Jackson who was there when King and some associates founded the Southern Christian Leadership Council and went on to start Rainbow/P.U.S.H. used his time before the attendees to remember the relationship King merged between labor and race.

If anyone should know, Jesse Jackson should. As the prodigy of King, Jackson saw up close the struggle of poor and working people to achieve a measure of the life many of their bosses experienced every day. King's dream was about so much more than race. It was about an America constructed by the ideas and hard work of Americans that should be enjoyed and participated in by all Americans.