The 1963 March on Washington featured just one prominent white speaker. “We will not solve education or housing or public accommodations, as long as millions of Negroes are treated as second-class economic citizens and denied jobs,” declared Walter Reuther, the legendary president of the United Auto Workers. “This rally is not the end, it's the beginning of a great moral crusade to arouse America to the unfinished work of American democracy.” Thus did he confidently link the goals of organized labor to those of the black freedom struggle.

Next week will mark the 50th anniversary of the march, and Reuther’s seven-minute address is all but forgotten. Most Americans think of the great event, which ended with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s transcendent speech, solely as a proud landmark in the toppling of legal segregation and the building of a more racially tolerant society. It might even seem odd that King and his associates would have given a featured spot on the program to perhaps the most powerful labor leader in the country—one whom Barry Goldwater, then the leading Republican candidate for president, considered “more dangerous than Soviet Russia.” What was such a controversial white man doing up there?

In 1963, progressive unionists of all races routinely intertwined the goals of civil rights and economic justice. That’s why the official slogan of the day was “For Jobs and Freedom.” Tens of thousands of union members, mostly from the North, crowded together along the Reflecting Pool with civil rights activists who were taking a break from the dangerous work of liberating the South.

Today, by and large, Americans embrace the narrative of racial equality and view King as a national icon whose “dream” has come true, at least in part. But most know little or nothing about the history of unions, or they regard it as a dark tale of corruption, greed, and incompetence. Google hits for Jimmy Hoffa outnumber those to Reuther by a four to one margin. For labor’s fortunes to revive, its members and supporters will have to craft and tell a different and more attractive story.

They might start with the March on Washington. Most of the black men and women who organized the 1963 March were also labor activists, as William P. Jones explains in his fine new history. The idea was initiated by A. Philip Randolph, the 74-year-old civil rights and union leader who was the sole black member of the AFL-CIO Executive Council and the Negro American Labor Council, formed in 1960 to abolish “the color line” in every institution from unions to schools to sports to government.