Across the south, state legislatures have passed ‘pre-emption laws’ stopping cities such as Democrat-run, majority-black Durham from heeding the Fight for $15

“Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around,” sang the Rev Curtis Greenwood, field director for the North Carolina NAACP, as he led a chorus of 100 labor and civil rights activists on Tuesday evening.

The activists had packed the historic mahogany church at Hayti Heritage Center in Durham to commemorate the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King and hold a field hearing for low-wage workers as they renewed their commitment to King’s dream.



“Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around,” sang the crowd. “I’m gonna keep on a-walkin’, keep on a-talkin’ / Marchin’ down to freedom land.” For North Carolina Fight for $15 activists, the march could be a very long one.

Unlike in other states, where urban progressive enclaves have raised their minimum wage, activists in North Carolina are legally barred from doing so. In 2013, the majority white Republican-held North Carolina general assembly passed a so-called “pre-emption law” that forbids cities, many of them majority black like Durham, from passing legislation to increase the minimum wage at the municipal level.



“These laws are denying the legacy of King and denying human rights,” said Abdul Burnette, a cook at Popeye’s who has worked in the fast-food industry for 20 years. “It’s not fair.”



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Without these laws, activists say that they could probably enact $15-an-hour minimum wages in cities like Durham. More than 100 employers in the city have already voluntarily agreed to adopt a living wage for their employees as part of the Durham Living Wage campaign. In 2016, Durham city council passed a law raising the minimum wage for all city employees to $15 an hour.



Many say that political support exists to extend the wage increase throughout Durham and other cities across North Carolina. However, Republicans, who hold a supermajority in the state general assembly, passed a state law in 2013 that forbids municipalities from raising their minimum wages above the statewide minimum wage of $7.25.



The story in Durham mirrors that in progressive urban enclaves across the south, where activists feel they could pass $15 an hour if only their cities were legally able to do so. The pre-emption laws are part of a growing trend by anti-union forces to stop the Fight for $15 in the main cities where Democratic voters control government. Twenty-three states now have pre-emption laws banning cities from passing laws increasing the minimum wage.

Every state in the south has a pre-emption law except West Virginia and Arkansas, where efforts are under way to enact them.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders lead a crowd of hundreds of thousands at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963. Photograph: Arnie Sachs/Rex/Shutterstock

Civil and labor rights activists say such laws are a slap in the face for the legacy of King, who was assassinated during a sanitation strike in Memphis in 1968. The state of Tennessee at the time did not allow collective bargaining for public employees, but since no local pre-emption law existed, King and the workers were ultimately successful in getting the city of Memphis to grant them collective bargaining rights unilaterally.



“[King] would remind us that [pre-emption laws] are part of the long legacy of using the power of state government to shore up injustice and inequality,” said Elon University labor law professor Eric Fink of Greensboro. “And they’re one way, along with gerrymandering, voter restrictions, etc, of effectively disenfranchising African Americans.”



Nationwide, pre-emption laws are quickly becoming a battlefield on which the civil rights and labor community are finding themselves fighting in court and the streets.



In August 2015, Birmingham city council voted to raise their minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. Then, in February 2016, the Alabama state legislature, where Republicans hold a supermajority, voted to passed a law nullifying Birmingham’s minimum wage increase.



The Alabama NAACP and Greater Birmingham Ministries sued the state charging that the legislature violated federal civil rights law. They claimed that the pre-emption of Birmingham’s minimum wage violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by allowing the white-dominated Alabama state legislature to overturn the democratic will of the majority-black city of Birmingham.



In February, US district judge R David Proctor ruled against them, saying that he could find no evidence of racial discrimination. Civil rights groups in the state are appealing against the decision.



While civil rights and labor groups are fighting pre-emption laws in court, they aren’t ignoring the need to win over rural southern whites. For the first time, the Fight for $15 is beginning to organize rural southern whites in towns such as Gastonia, North Carolina.



“We’ve got to take that message to working people – black, white and brown – in both cities and small towns across this state,” said the North Carolina AFL-CIO secretary, MaryBe McMillian, who attended the first Fight for $15 rally in Gastonia on Tuesday. “If we want economic justice, we can’t focus just on urban areas or one demographic of workers.”



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It’s a fight that may take years, but one that many in North Carolina say they are prepared to undertake.



Nikki Cannady, a home healthcare worker making only $7.50, said that she was introduced to the Fight for $15 by a white man she was caring for while he died.



Cannady said the man was outraged when he found out how much she made and talked her into coming with him to her first Fight for $15 meeting in 2014. A week later, her patient died.



For the past three years, she has got heavily involved in the Fight for $15, where she meet her husband with whom she has a nine-month-old child.



“I have a lot of patience and when I think about my patient, it keeps me going,” said Cannady. “People want you to give up, that’s a thing, but it doesn’t take but one to keep going. If that one person keeps on going, someone will eventually listen.”



“You just gotta have patience and faith,” said Cannady.



Mike Elk is a member of the Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild. He is the co-founder of Payday Report and was previously senior labor reporter at Politico

