Demand forces city to change venue for Bernie Sanders, Mayor Lumumba town hall

[Donkees]

14. Economic justice was always part of MLK Jr.s message

Excerpt:

As the 50th anniversary of the murder of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. approaches, historian Michael Honey reminds us in a new book that labor rights and economic justice were always part of his progressive message.

The book, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice, (W.W. Norton, 2018) comes out on April 3—the day before the 50-year anniversary of King’s assassination.

The story in To the Promised Land starts with his speech the night before he was killed. In Memphis, sanitation workers were on strike—in the midst of a huge crisis going on in that city. He was in the midst of trying to organize a poor people’s campaign to confront the federal government about racism, poverty and runaway militarism in 1968.

King said the best anti-poverty program is a union. Where you can fight for your own agenda—somebody doesn’t have to hand it to you. But you have to be organized to do that. King always supported unions. He gave his life in that cause, in a sense.

Many workers in this country recognize King as a labor hero. “We can get more together than we can apart,” King said in Memphis. He always said we have a common destiny, and he put it in an economic framework. And we so need that.

https://www.futurity.org/martin-luther-king-jr-economic-justice-1716672/


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When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, NAACP president Cornell Williams Brooks, and actor Danny Glover joined thousands of Mississippians in marching for labor rights ..., economic and social justice activist Chokwe Antar Lumumba was in the thick of it. “I stand for workers’ rights,” Lumumba said, as the marchers converged on a Nissan plant where workers have been organizing for union protections. “[The] struggle does not cease and so we’re constantly in the battle of how we create self-determined lives for people. And we believe in human rights for human beings and you cannot support human rights if you’re not prepared to support workers’ rights. And so, we live in a world where you have so many with so little and so few with so much. And so, we’re trying to change that dynamic right here [in Mississippi]—we want to change the order of the world.”

The Washington-obsessed national media paid scant attention to that “March on Mississippi.” But it was big news in the state, sparking serious talk about the new wave of in-the-streets and at-the-polls activism that is sweeping the South ... that wave swept into Mississippi’s largest city, Jackson, where voters nominated Lumumba for mayor.

https://www.thenation.com/article/jackson-mississippi-just-chose-radical-leftist-chokwe-antar-lumumba-to-be-the-next-mayor/