The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s address to the AFL-CIO fourth constitutional convention

The piece reprints excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.'s December 1961 address to the AFL-CIO, in which he laid out why the civil rights movement and organized labor shared a common cause. King traced labor's history from child sweatshop workers to the Wagner Act, arguing that rights written into law meant nothing until workers organized to claim them in practice.

King drew a direct line between union organizing and the sit-ins and civil disobedience of the civil rights movement, noting that Black Americans were overwhelmingly a working people with needs identical to labor's: wages, housing, education, and security. He warned that the same coalition of interests opposing unions in the 19th century was regrouping in new form, naming the Birch Society, business-military alliances, and Dixiecrat-reactionary coalitions as the era's version of that old despotism.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.