![]() ![]() Think back almost half a century to 1963 when a quarter of a million people gathered on the National Mall before the Lincoln Memorial in the great March on Washington. It was Nixon who approached the newcomer King to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association trade unionists in the North offered substantial financial and logistical support to the boycott and, from the perspective of the Pullman Porters, the boycott was theirstory which they covered in detail in the pages of the Black Worker, the porters’ monthly journal. Nixon, a local civil rights activist who was a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. But the boycott’s origins lay elsewhere, in part with a trade unionist, E.D. ![]() That narrative also features a young Martin Luther King, Jr., a then-obscure young minister whose political career on the national and international stage was launched by his leadership of the boycott. The standard story features a tired seamstress, Rosa Parks, whose courageous refusal to give up her seat on a segregated public bus launched a boycott and a movement. Take one of the key moments in the emergence of the modern civil rights movement: The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56. And that connection – labor and civil rights – has deep historical roots. In recent years, the labor movement has come to embrace and, to an unprecedented degree, champion racial and gender equality, often putting it at the forefront of movements for equality and civil rights in the United States. There is no question that the American labor force is characterized by unprecedented diversity – and, not surprisingly, organized labor is as well. Anyone familiar with the labor movement today knows that organized labor is a heterogeneous group – African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Asian Americans, whites, men and women, citizens and undocumented workers all make up the ranks of the unions affiliated with Change to Win and the AFL-CIO. ![]()
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