Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. (sanitation strike and more videos at AFL-CIO)

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/04/04/remembering-martin-luther-king-jr/

To commemorate the 40th anniversary today of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., we’ve excerpted a speech delivered today by AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff to the Southern Regional Meeting on April 4, 2008.

Thank you for your welcome, but most importantly, thanks for all you do everyday. I am very proud to be one of you—a CLC president for 10 years. And, like you, I am damn proud to be a progressive southern trade unionist.

This is my home—not Memphis, but West Tennessee—all up and down the highways and the Mississippi River. My family roots are here, and I was born 50 miles from here in a tiny town called Trezevant.

So it is particularly significant for me to stand before you today on April 4, 2008, 40 years since Dr. King was assassinated during a strike, a struggle and a movement to win the right to organize for 1,400 sanitation workers.

We cannot think about Dr. King today without thinking about what he left for us to do and our responsibility to his memory.

Dr. King believed in union organizing. And like everything he believed in, he struggled for it. That is why he and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) walked the picket line and supported the strikers at the Script Strike in Atlanta in 1963. That is why the SCLC struggled alongside 1199 at the Charleston, S.C., hospital strike.

That belief in organizing is what brought Dr. King, against the advice of his top staff, to Memphis, where he galvanized a community, and indeed a nation, to struggle for the human dignity that is due every worker by virtue of being created in the image and by the hand of an almighty and all-loving God.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1184514448?bclid=1342091326&bctid=1373284494 (several videos at link)

Big Business and its mainstream media have spent millions of dollars in the past 40 years trying to convince us that Dr. King was a dreamer. Bullshit! Dr. King had a dream, but he struggled and sacrificed—and more importantly, he organized others to struggle and sacrifice to realize that dream.

FULL story at link.