Most Americans know that a white racist assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4,1968 – fifty years ago. But few understand the historical context and why King was in Memphis.
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Ed Sadlowski passed away yesterday. His life is a testament to the grit of the leftwing Midwestern union militants. His roots in unionism go back to the Southern Illinois coalfields and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations of the 1930s.
Read more →While Margo Price’s concerns are political through and through, she isn’t hosting any pity parties. Many of her songs rock, countering the sobering lyrics.
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Michael K. Honey is the author of the new study, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice, to be published on the 50th anniversary of King’s April 4, 1968 assassination. He was interviewed by Charles Williams of the Against the Current editorial board.
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On Feb. 1, 1968, Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed to death while riding out a cold, driving rainstorm in the back of an outmoded “packer” garbage truck in Memphis. Unsafe working conditions, racism and abuse had long been intolerable for the city’s 1,300 sanitation workers.
Read more →Steven Parfitt, who spoke at LAWCHA’s Seattle conference, asks LAWCHA members to support the ongoing lecturers’ strike in the UK by contributing to the University and College Union’s “fighting fund.” As Steven notes, “I know that at my branch, and many other branches, this fund is being used particularly to help contingent faculty who want to strike but can’t afford to do so otherwise.”
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Liz Faue’s new book, Rethinking the American Labor Movement, is our field’s newest attempt to reinterpret U.S. Labor History. I asked her a to tell us a little bit more about the arc of her interpretation.
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Public transit infrastructure in Washington, D.C. is crumbling. Metro and bus services have been cut. Fares have gone up. And, safety remains a problem. After 40 years of deferred maintenance, poor management, and the lack of decent, long-term funding, the Metro system needs $1.4 billion worth of repairs, and it must close a $290 million budget gap just to continue basic operations.
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Donald Trump’s election, made possible in part by his ability to capture the hearts, minds, aspirations, and votes of working-class men and women, has caused confusion and consternation among Democratic Party leaders. Stunned by the outcome, the Party has spent the last year searching for new messages that could lure this critically important constituency back into the fold.
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In 1988, the Labor Education Program (a labor studies extension school) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s School of Labor and Employment Relations established the Regina V. Polk Women’s Labor Leadership Conference (Polk School). Funding through an annual grant established in honor of International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Local 743 organizer Regina V.
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