MLK Day 2020: Labor, Love, and Community

The MLK Day March in Chattanooga near the MLK mural (Jan. 20, 2020)

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day here in the United States. I’ve written before about why MLK Day is my favorite holiday, King’s relation to science fiction, the idea of a moral arc, moving beyond "MLK-Lite," and my visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. 

For 2020, I thought I’d discuss the labor movement, partly because I finally got around to participating in my local MLK Day March with fellow members of my union, United Campus Workers! (More pictures here and below). 

Of the many things people seem to forget in the midst of the Disneyification of Martin Luther King, Jr. is that he was a big proponent of the labor movement. He was murdered in Memphis while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike. His famous “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 

You can read more about King’s connections with the labor movement here and here and here.  

For me unions and labor organizing more generally are productive ways to forge solidarity with fellow human beings to aim for the kind of community that King dedicated his life to creating. While I believe it’s a mistake to think, as some white leftists seem to, that economic solidarity can erase or downplay very real legacies and structural oppressions like racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., solidarity with other workers based on economic interests is maybe a step in the right direction.  

We’re all in this together as workers. As King said, perhaps echoing the Buddhist concept of interdependence, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We may have, in the Orwellian parlance of anti-labor politicians in states like Tennessee, the “right to work,” but what good is that right if we can only exercise it in unjust conditions? If I only care about my own working conditions at the expense of others? If I am told I should be happy for what I have while ignoring the needs of others? 

The labor movement is a social expression of love, compassion, and respect for all people, exactly the kind of thing that King’s heroes from Jesus to Gandhi proclaimed. It is a way to demonstrate that caring about other people is not a weakness, but a strength. Reading King’s work is one of the main reasons I have come to see that a society is severely ill when it becomes common to believe that it's unnatural or irrational to care about one’s fellow human beings.

In his deepest and most challenging book, King asked, “Where do we go from here: Chaos or community?” I sincerely hope that we can get from the chaos and sickness of cynical individualism to the community and healing of a humane society. And, like King, I see the labor movement as one part of making this happen.

Happy MLK Day 2020!

United Campus Workers at the MLK Day March (Chattanooga, Jan. 20, 2020)


Stevie Wonder's "Happy Birthday"!

Local history connection: Dr. King once applied for a job at this church on E. 8th St. in Chattanooga... and didn't get the job.

Another local connection: Chattanooga's very own Lookout Mountain is mentioned in King's "I Have a Dream" speech.