How do these speeches collected here help us reevaluate King's legacy?

The book contains 15 different documents from 1957 to 1968, and they all present a somewhat different side of King that most people don't know about. Almost all of these speeches are unknown to the general public. Until recently, King's economic justice platform and his relationship with workers and unions has been an almost entirely neglected topic.

The civil rights movement was not just about civil rights—it was about human rights, and that means labor rights. The book is really about a period when King was trying to use the momentum of the civil rights movement to help the labor movement, the cause of public employee workers, and people in the service economy. And those are the areas where unions have grown tremendously in the last 20 or 30 years—in part because of Dr. King's sacrifice in Memphis.

Your collection shows King's systematic, concerted effort to yoke the predominately black civil rights movement with the predominately white, and sometimes socially conservative, labor movement. Why was this so important to him?

You have to ask: Why is he making these speeches in the first place? At that time in our history, there were a lot of very strong unions. He's asking them to donate money to the civil rights movement, which was an emerging movement, and he makes an interesting plea: You have a lot more power than we do, but we have the moral agenda—and the attention of the nation that you're losing. The business community and the media had been propagating this idea of big labor and union bosses, separating the unions from the workers, making them appear to be corrupt. And there were some corrupt unions. And some unions that were not only ignoring people of color, but totally excluding them. King wanted to convince the unions that the civil rights movement was not only important on its own—but that its success was crucial to the labor movement's success, too.

In a 1968 speech, King asks: "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?" Had he started to feel that race reform was doomed without economic reform, and vice versa?

He did say that the civil rights that we'd attained from Brown vs. Board of Education to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were a remarkable change, but after that he really did emphasize economic issues. The urban areas were exploding all across the country. There were riots, police brutality, and National Guard occupation of black communities. The fact was, in the urban areas, civil rights didn't do anything to change the economic situation for the mass of working class people. Those were people that should have had jobs and union wages, who should have been advancing themselves. Instead, factories were shutting down. Jobs were being shipped overseas. The urban areas were being stripped of all economic activities. It was like stranding the millions of people who'd migrated to the cities for jobs. So, without an economic program—yes, that's what he was saying—the civil rights we've gained won't be meaningful for most people.

From "All Labor Has Dignity," March 18, 1968