Nearly 60 years ago, a quarter-million people rallied together for the historic “March on Washington,” where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. What’s sometimes forgotten about the march, though, is that it was actually called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” The demands of the march included an end to segregation and the protection of voting rights, alongside an increase to the federal minimum wage and a federal jobs program to train and employ all unemployed workers. It was understood that ending poverty — with decent wages and full employment — was essential to achieving racial equality in practice.
It’s for this reason that Dr. King was a strong and unwavering proponent of the labor movement and unions as the principal means for workers of all races to fight for improved wages, employment, and working conditions. In fact, he was in Memphis, Tennessee, standing alongside public sanitation workers on strike for equal pay just a day before he was assassinated. And it wasn’t just Dr. King who viewed unions as an integral part of the civil rights movement. Workers did too, organizing in their unions for months to attend the March. And one of the key architects and leaders of the March, A. Philip Randolph, was a longtime labor leader who organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union of primarily Black workers in the railroad industry. Dr. King’s legacy, alongside those of countless other civil rights leaders, exemplifies how the civil rights movement and the labor movement are so deeply intertwined.