Though hard­ly unknown, King’s deep com­mit­ment to unions remains large­ly left out of the tra­di­tion­al telling of his sto­ry. Indeed, many do not know he cham­pi­oned mul­ti­ple union caus­es in addi­tion to fight­ing to end white suprema­cy. In fact, King devot­ed a large part of his short life to advo­cat­ing that work­ers — whether African Amer­i­can or not — join unions, for one of his fore­most goals was erad­i­cat­ing poverty.

King lit­er­al­ly died while fight­ing for a union, mur­dered in Mem­phis in 1968 while help­ing that city’s san­i­ta­tion work­ers, a major­i­ty of whom were black, orga­nize a local of the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of State, Coun­ty, and Munic­i­pal Employ­ees (AFSCME). King had repeat­ed­ly vis­it­ed the city in his final months to aid the orga­niz­ing effort. The city’s elect­ed offi­cials were both racist and anti-union — no coincidence.

Today, April 4 th , we remem­ber the life and dreams of Dr. Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. for on this day, in 1968, he was mur­dered by a white suprema­cist at the age of 39.

The year before being mur­dered, King found a mighty ally in the Inter­na­tion­al Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), which had been fight­ing for work­ers and against racism since its incep­tion in the 1930s. The day of King’s death, the mem­bers of ILWU Local 10 in San Fran­cis­co shut down the port to hon­or his life and protest his death. To this day, the ILWU and many oth­er unions con­tin­ue striv­ing to achieve King’s vision.

King fought racism and pover­ty, two sides of the same coin

King, of course, is best known for help­ing lead the fight against racial seg­re­ga­tion and white suprema­cy. While deeply impor­tant, the Civ­il Rights Act of 1964 and Vot­ing Rights Act of 1965 did not result in equal rights for all. End­ing legal dis­crim­i­na­tion based on race proved the easy part. Much hard­er, alas, has been erad­i­cat­ing pover­ty, itself inex­tri­ca­bly linked to racial equality.

As a Chris­t­ian, King con­sid­ered it immoral that, in a nation as wealthy as the Unit­ed States, there should be any poor peo­ple. As an Amer­i­can, he chal­lenged every­one to live up to the ide­al of equal­i­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ty, famous­ly once quip­ping, ​“What good does it do to be able to eat at a lunch counter if you can’t buy a hamburger?”

To uplift the poor, King encour­aged all work­ers to join unions, call­ing them America’s first and great­est anti-pover­ty pro­gram. Sim­ply put, when work­ers are stronger, they bar­gain for high­er salaries, safer work­places, paid parental and elder­care leave, health insur­ance, pen­sions and oth­er ben­e­fits. The evi­dence is unde­ni­able: work­ers in unions get paid much more pre­cise­ly because they have more pow­er. For the same rea­son, employ­ers hate unions and do every­thing in their pow­er, legal­ly and ille­gal­ly, to keep them out of workplaces.

King believed that unions were among the best ways to help black peo­ple, and all peo­ple real­ly, escape pover­ty. The cor­re­la­tion between high­er union mem­ber­ship and a larg­er mid­dle class is quite strong. In the 1950s, when union mem­ber­ship was at its high­est, the U.S. mid­dle class was at its largest. Anoth­er effect of dri­ving up wages — that is, redis­trib­ut­ing income down­ward — was the dras­tic reduc­tion in eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty. Won­der why, over the past 40 years, the U.S. mid­dle class has plum­met­ed and inequal­i­ty soared? The dra­mat­ic decline in union mem­ber­ship has a lot to do with it.

Mem­phis was hard­ly King’s first for­ay into union­ism. In 1961, for instance, King spoke before the AFL-CIO where he described ​“a dream of equal­i­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ty, of priv­i­lege and prop­er­ty wide­ly dis­trib­uted; a dream of a land where men will not take neces­si­ties from the many to give lux­u­ries to the few.” While nowhere near as famous as his 1963 ​“I have a dream” speech, we can see that the foun­da­tion of that his­toric talk already had been laid.

That’s why King repeat­ed­ly trav­eled to Mem­phis in 1968. Notably, the AFSCME cam­paign slo­gan, for Mem­phis’ over­whelm­ing­ly African-Amer­i­can san­i­ta­tion work­ers, was ​“I Am A Man,” lit­er­al­ly under­lin­ing the con­nec­tions between dig­ni­ty, pover­ty and union­ism for black people.

King in San Fran­cis­co: meet­ing the nation’s lead­ing civ­il rights union

When King want­ed to cham­pi­on union­ism to uplift poor African Amer­i­cans, he found his way to the ILWU, arguably the most pro­gres­sive union in 1960s Amer­i­ca. The San Fran­cis­co Bay Area branch, Local 10, was the largest and most rad­i­cal in the ILWU, count­ing over 4,000 mem­bers in the mid 1960s, about half of who were African Amer­i­cans. In 1967, for the first time, Local 10 elect­ed a black man, Cleophas Williams, as president.

The ILWU, since its found­ing and vic­to­ri­ous ​“Big Strike” in 1934, had com­mit­ted itself to racial inte­gra­tion. San Fran­cis­co long­shore­man and Aus­tralian immi­grant Har­ry Bridges emerged at this moment to lead dock­work­ers along the entire West Coast. Why did Bridges and oth­er San Fran­cis­co long­shore­men — in 1934 near­ly all white — reach out to African Amer­i­can work­ers and the larg­er black com­mu­ni­ty? Prag­ma­tism, for one, as employ­ers fre­quent­ly hired black work­ers as replace­ments. Blacks felt lit­tle remorse for doing so since near­ly all unions in Amer­i­ca were patent­ly racist. Bet­ter to bring black work­ers into the fold, the San Fran­cis­co long­shore­men thought, than ​“let” them become strike­break­ers. But this log­ic had not con­vinced most unions before the 1930s to embrace African Amer­i­cans (or immi­grants or women).

Bridges and many in the ILWU also were ide­o­log­i­cal­ly com­mit­ted to racial inclu­sion because of their social­ist val­ues. Some were Com­mu­nists, oth­ers were Wob­blies. Bridges and oth­er left­ist long­shore­men saw all work­ers — regard­less of race — as mem­bers of a sin­gle class, the work­ing class, who shared a com­mon ene­my: employers.

In San Fran­cis­co, rad­i­cal white union­ists active­ly lined up black dock­work­ers and pro­mot­ed racial equal­i­ty. Williams, an African Amer­i­can from rur­al Arkansas who found his way to the San Fran­cis­co docks dur­ing World War II, recent­ly told me, ​“Those [whites] who were more active in express­ing con­cern [for African Amer­i­cans], I lat­er found out, were con­sid­ered to be left-wingers. They were the ones who would come over and speak to you.”

Williams also recalled Bridges’ famous claim that, if there were only two long­shore­men left, he would pre­fer one to be black. Williams found it ​“very shock­ing to me because there was no polit­i­cal gain for him by mak­ing this state­ment,” when whites made up the vast major­i­ty of long­shore­men and in a nation where white suprema­cy reigned supreme. He con­tin­ued to his­tor­i­cal soci­ol­o­gist Howard Kimel­dorf, ​“I had read and been exposed to some of the left-wing forces, but I had nev­er heard any­one [white] put his neck out on the chop­ping block by mak­ing a pub­lic state­ment of this kind.”

Black and white long­shore­men, Local 10, and their Inter­na­tion­al did not stop at inte­grat­ing their own ranks, they also became deeply involved in count­less, relat­ed strug­gles for social jus­tice includ­ing: The ILWU con­demned the mass incar­cer­a­tion of Japan­ese Amer­i­cans dur­ing WWII; par­tic­i­pat­ed in the first major protest against domes­tic anti-com­mu­nism in 1960 at San Francisco’s City Hall; helped orga­nize a mas­sive civ­il rights march in sol­i­dar­i­ty with the civ­il rights move­ment in Birm­ing­ham in 1963; built the first pri­vate­ly financed, inte­grat­ed and afford­able hous­ing devel­op­ment in SF; crit­i­cized the U.S. war in Viet­nam; active­ly sup­port­ed to the Pan-Indi­an occu­pa­tion of Alca­traz Island in 1969; and sup­port­ed, finan­cial­ly and through boy­cotts, the efforts of Cal­i­for­nia farm work­ers, heav­i­ly Lati­no and Fil­ipino, to orga­nize the Unit­ed Farm Work­ers (UFW). San Fran­cis­co long­shore work­ers and their union helped lead Bay Area social move­ments in a piv­otal time in U.S. History.

For these rea­sons and more, the ILWU can be described as a civ­il rights union, one of a hand­ful of unions that had inte­grat­ed their own ranks and fought for racial equal­i­ty. The pol­i­tics and his­to­ry of the ILWU explains why King trav­eled to San Fran­cis­co in 1967.

Address­ing a large gath­er­ing at Local 10’s hall, King declared, ​“I don’t feel like a stranger here in the midst of the ILWU. We have been strength­ened and ener­gized by the sup­port you have giv­en to our strug­gles. …We’ve learned from labor the mean­ing of power.”

More than 40 years lat­er, Williams described King’s speech to me: ​“He talked about the eco­nom­ics of dis­crim­i­na­tion.” Williams point­ed out that, ​“What [King] said is what Bridges had been say­ing all along,” name­ly all work­ers ben­e­fit by erad­i­cat­ing racism. That day, ILWU Local 10 made King an hon­orary mem­ber, join­ing Paul Robe­son who, ear­li­er, had earned this honor.

Want to fight racism? Join a union

King’s sup­port for union­ism expand­ed great­ly in his final years. After the legal dis­man­tling of Jim Crow, King — by then the most influ­en­tial social move­ment leader of his gen­er­a­tion — devot­ed increas­ing ener­gy to pro­mot­ing unions and oppos­ing the war in Viet­nam. Alas, he was cut down just as had launched the inter­ra­cial Poor People’s Cam­paign.



Tra­di­tion­al­ly when some­one dies on the water­front, long­shore work­ers stop work for the rest of the shift to hon­or the fall­en. And, so, when word spread of King’s mur­der, Local 10 shut down the ports of the San Fran­cis­co Bay.

More recent­ly, Local 10 rank-and-fil­ers shut down the Port of Oak­land on anoth­er April 4. That day, in 2011, dock­work­ers protest­ed Wis­con­sin Gov­er­nor Scott Walk­er who had just rammed through a con­tro­ver­sial bill strip­ping pub­lic sec­tor work­ers of many of their rights. While the union’s elect­ed lead­ers offi­cial­ly dis­avowed this action, ordi­nary long­shore work­ers appre­ci­at­ed that so-called ​“right to work” laws were an attack on unions every­where, so they put down their tools.

Forty-eight years after King’s death, unions are weak­er than they have been since the Great Depres­sion. But they remain a potent method to reduce black pover­ty. The huge eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits that unions afford their mil­lions of mem­bers, uplift­ing them into the mid­dle class, can­not be ignored.

Those con­cerned with racism, pover­ty and eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty should appre­ci­ate that unions are among the most effec­tive means to attack these evils simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. King under­stood this real­i­ty, which was why he criss­crossed the nation col­lab­o­rat­ing with unions, includ­ing ILWU Local 10, to fight white suprema­cy. Today, as we com­mem­o­rate the death of Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., the best way to hon­or his lega­cy is to join or orga­nize a union.