Revisiting Martin Luther King's Last Campaign and Unfinished Agenda

University of Washington Tacoma UW Tacoma Digital Commons SIAS Faculty Publications School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences 2018 Revisiting Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign and Unfinished Agenda Michael K. Honey University of Washington Tacoma, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/ias_pub Recommended Citation Honey, Michael K., "Revisiting Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign and Unfinished Agenda" (2018). SIAS Faculty Publications. 1049. https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/ias_pub/1049 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at UW Tacoma Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in SIAS Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UW Tacoma Digital Commons. NANZAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES Volume 40 (2018): 121-135 Revisiting Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign and Unfinished Agenda Michael K. HONEY ＊ “I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Freedom...” “When the union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run, There can be no power anywhere beneath the sun, for what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one But in union we are strong...” “Stayed on freedom,” sung by slaves emancipating themselves during the U.S. Civil War and again in churches and during the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, reminds us that the struggle for African American freedom has been long and hard. “Solidarity Forever,” composed in 1915 by Industrial Workers of the World activist Ralph Chaplin during World War I, picks up another thread of American history: the struggle for worker rights. Chaplin’s song tells us of the exploitation of labor for the benefit of the wealthy, and that through organizing, workers can make their demands: “the union makes us strong.” These two songs are not usually sung together, but I like to sing them that way because they link the ongoing struggle in American history for freedom and for economic justice.1 As we rethink the historical legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., who died in Memphis, Tennessee, from an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968, over fifty years ago, these two struggles remain interconnected. Each generation rethinks its history and we are especially doing so in the U.S. ＊ Michael K. Honey is the Fred and Dorothy Haley Endowed Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma, the author of five books, and the editor of King’s labor speeches. He worked as a civil rights and civil liberties organizer across the South from 1970― 1976, based in Memphis. 1. Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser, Everybody Says Freedom (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1989), 175―82; Guy and Candie Carawan, Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement through Its Songs (Bethlehem, Pa.: Sing Out Publications, 1990); Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser, Carry it On! History in Song and Picture of the Working Men of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 112―14; Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer, Songs of Work and Protest: 100 Favorite Songs of American Workers Complete with Music and Historical Notes (New York: Dover Publications, 1973), 12―13. 121 today. Our context is the dramatic shift to the right, as the Republican Party controls most U.S. state legislatures and governorships, the presidency, the Supreme Court and, as of this writing, Congress (we hope this will change). The reigning Republicans are using their power to crush labor rights, suppress voting rights, and, above all, enhance the wealth and power of the top 1 percent of the population at the expense of the great majority of Americans who rely on wages and fixed incomes for a living. President Donald Trump issues daily untrue statements and tweets, bullies critics, and tells people not to believe journalists but believe his fantastic stories instead; uses open sexism and racism to stir up renewed male supremacy and white nationalist movements; and presides over the deregulation of environmental protections on behalf of the petro-chemical and mining industries. As Trump undercuts environmental protections and pulls out of international climate change agreements aimed at curbing global warming, as I write this the temperature is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Japan, while the region of the Pacific Northwest in which I live is engulfed in forest fires and clouds of smoke. Trump’s policies represent the long-standing agenda of the Republican Party and its wealthy benefactors. It has long supported massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich, who are using those tax cuts to inflate their profits by buying back corporate stock while donating hundreds of millions back to Republican politicians. Republicans have made an ideological position of trying to roll back all forms of government intervention to protect people and the environment. They support the huge escalation of military spending as Trump promises to militarize space; seek to cut back food stamps and social programs that benefit poor and working people; and sabotage full health care for women and health care at a reduced cost for all Americans. Republican tax cuts have cut income to the federal government while increasing spending, ballooning the national debt while planning to undermine Medicare and Social Security systems that working people have paid into their entire lives. Their president undermines the stability of the global financial and export system and stirs conflict abroad while undercutting constitutional protections at home of both citizens and immigrants protected by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.2 2. Documenting this summary would require another article in itself. The stories of the Trump/Republican triumph/disaster since the election of 2016 can be easily traced through the “fake news” outlets of the New York Times and the Washington Post. To take one example, after reducing corporate taxes by 20 percent and individual tax rates for the wealthiest people from 35 percent to 21 percent, the U.S. increased the budget deficit by $76.9 billion, more than a 20 percent increase from the previous year. The Republican tax cut will produce a total deficit of over one trillion dollars for the next year, based on a tax cut that goes mainly to the rich, of over $1.5 trillion expected in the next ten years. This is the work of Republicans who claim to be “conservative.” Martin Crutsinger, “U.S. budget deficit in July totals $76.9 billion,” Associated Press, August 11, 2018. 122 NANZAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES 40 / 2018 Dr. King would be appalled. How could this happen in a nation that declares in its founding documents that “all men are created equal” and endowed with “unalienable rights” including “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”? As King preached and as we still find today, those who have the greatest wealth and power can never get enough and always want more; they do not seem to care if they get it at the expense of everyone else. Other capitalist countries do not necessarily enshrine greed and profits as national priorities. In the U.S., the top 1 percent owns more wealth than 90 percent of the rest of us, and its four richest people own more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population. Particularly egregious, given our history of slavery and racism, the president and his supporters have perpetuated “us against them” racial conflicts, increasing the sense of many people who identify as “white” that they have racial grievances against black athletes, against Latino and Muslim immigrants, and “others.” Since the “southern strategy” of President Richard M. Nixon in 1968, Republican politicians have stoked racial conflict to split potential interracial working-class alliances and promote racial divisions to gain and hold power. This is an old story and an old strategy in American history, involving Democrats as well as Republicans.3 In the face of all this, I begin with freedom and labor movement songs to remind us that people in the U.S. have long struggled to unite workers and communities of color to confront common problems; that history suggests that it remains possible to work together against poverty and economic inequality, to stop forever wars and global warming, and create a better future.4 Freedom and labor movement songs remind us that our story is only part of a much larger story of Native peoples, slaves, indentured servants, immigrants, workers, and men and women of all ethnicities and genders who have long struggled for a better life. A vast and growing literature in American Studies on the leading role of women in the civil rights movement and a literature of grassroots organizing has documented that the history of social change is not about the “great man” theory in which a special leader rescues us from our troubles.5 Nonetheless, as a historian and 3. For an update on these issues, see the special issue of The Nation, July 16/23, 2018. Eric Foner, in Give Me Liberty! An American History, vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), reminds us that southern Democrats were the mainstay of both slavery and segregation until the tables turned when African Americans won full suffrage under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 4. “Declaration of Independence” (1776), in Foner, Give Me Liberty!, A-23. Foner provides the most reliable overview of American history. 5. Most recently, see for example, Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013) and A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); and Roxanne Dunbar- Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), in a NANZAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES 40 / 2018 123 activist who has lived through the last fifty years, the current crisis of democracy in the U.S.

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