Fifty years ago, in the mid-1960s, Martin Luther King Junior was drawing his movement’s attention from civil rights to economic justice. The rights of the working poor cut across racial divides for King, and for his wife Coretta Scott King. They saw the civil rights movement as intertwined with the work of unions to raise wages and improve working conditions. In the 1960s African Americans were moving into cities as jobs and factories were moving elsewhere.
Here is Dr. King in March 1968:
For most of the poverty-stricken people in this country are working everyday. They are making wages so inadequate that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of the nation. They are working full-time jobs for part-time income.
When Dr. King was assassinated a month later, he was in Memphis, Tennessee organizing his “Poor People’s Campaign” and preparing for a march with striking sanitation workers. Just days after his death, his widow led a march in Memphis with those workers … and a year later, continuing her work on the Poor People’s Campaign, she came to Baltimore to speak to ’the Hospital and Nursing Home Employees Union, Local 1199E,’ which was seeking the right to represent hospital workers.
Mrs. King issued a statement, quoted by the Baltimore Sun: “I regard this election as tremendously important in the struggle to wipe out poverty wages and win a measure of self-respect and dignity for all Baltimore hospital workers.”
To understand the connection between the civil rights and worker rights movements here in Baltimore, producer Jonna McKone spoke with long-time activist Bob Moore – who was awarded an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement Award by the City of Baltimore Community Relations Commission in 2000. She also sat down with two members of the 1199 union, Annie Henry and Laura Pugh, who met Coretta Scott King in the late sixties.
