Trump, DeVos, and other Republican enemies of a good and decent society falsely claim to be leading “the civil rights movement of our time,” that is, for vouchers and charters and school choice and against teachers’ unions. It is worthwhile to remember why Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis on the day he was assassinated. He was fighting for the city’s sanitation workers. They were ill-paid and worked in dangerous conditions. They wanted to form a union to demand their rights. He was there to help them.

Norm Hill was a close associate of Dr. King. He was with him in Memphis on the day he was murdered.

He tells the story here. 

He reminds us that “at the 1961 AFL-CIO convention, King warned that black people should be skeptical of anti-union forces, noting that the “labor-hater and race-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other.”

Organized labor is under attack today. The far right wants to obliterate it. They want all workers to be part of the “gig” economy, with no pensions, no benefits, no collective bargaining, no representation. Voucher schools do not have unions; they are free to discriminate against students and staff. Let us not forget that more than 90% of charter schools are non-union, which explains why the anti-union Walton Family Foundation, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and ALEC are devoted to opening more charter schools. They are not interested in better education or civil rights. They want to break the last powerful unions: the AFT and the NEA.

Dr. King understood that powerless workers need unions to fight for them.

Hill ends like this:

While Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb continued to oppose the unionization of the sanitation workers, in the end, his opposition was overridden by the city council that felt the pressure from mounting constituent complaints about tons of garbage reeking in their streets.

Success.

Yet, on the 50th anniversary of the Memphis sanitation workers strike, organized labor faces new and powerful challenges. For example, the case of Janus v. AFSCME, which the U.S. Supreme Court is taking up, raises whether unions have the fundamental right to expect public workers they represent to pay union dues. The matter is likely to be decided this year. The implications of a decision, for obvious reasons, could be profound regarding public sector unions like, for instance, the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of Teachers, affecting millions of workers.

In response to a White House and far right that appears determined to not only turn back the clock — but break it — regarding organized labor in America, arises a new necessity. We must, following the example of Randolph and Dr. King, harness an emerging coalition of progressive forces that today must include not only traditional civil rights and labor groups, but also Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo and related women’s movements.

At the same time, demonstrations of this collective power must be felt at the ballot box nationwide, especially as midterm elections draw near.

Randolph left us an indelible blueprint for action when he said, “At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything, and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.”