MEMPHIS, Tenn.The head of one of the nations largest unions and the one Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was marching for when he was murdered 50 years ago says that while the nation has come far in ensuring years, it is still far from the promised land.
Lee Saunders, president of the State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)reeled off a litany of U.S. ills. Among them: White bigotry, persecution of immigrants, attacks on the right to unionize, and African-American futures obliterated by mass incarceration.
After each, Saunders asked the packed house in Memphis, Tenn., Have we reached the promised land?
The answer is no.
Saunders union was the goal of the organizing drive among African-American sanitation workers that brought Dr. King to Memphis 50 years ago. They never quit, he said.
They were sick and tired of being sick and tired, he said, quoting civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. The workers were making only $70 weekly, often not enough to feed their families, were frequently racially humiliated, being called boy, working in unsafe conditions while their warnings were ignored and on a 20th-century slave plantation.
But amid the doom and gloom Saunders cited, as one of a line of speakers at the recollection of Kings Mountaintop Speech the night before the assassination, he warned the I Am A Man 2018 conference that It is not a commemoration.
Its a call to action, to fight poverty, state by state, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block a call to action to get to the promised land, the AFSCME leader added.
Saunders was one of the highlight speakers of the April 3 commemoration. Others were civil rights leader and former Atlanta Mayor Andy Young, Paul Chavez, the eldest son of noted United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, and two of Kings children, Dr. Bernice King and Martin Luther King III.
The finest thing was to sacrifice a life in the struggle for justice, Chavez said, speaking of both Dr. King and his own fathers near-fatal fast for farmworker rights. Dr. King telegraphed my father: Our struggles are one.
Do not get anyways tired! King III said. Our roads may not be easy, but I knowI knowI know our God did not bring us thus far to leave us.
Bernice King, also a minister, led off her sermon with a darker view, saying her father on the morning of his murder called his mother with the title of the sermon he planned to preach the following Sunday: America is going to hell.
Fifty years later, America may still go to hell, she declared. It will unless the U.S. repents as Daddy challenged and deals with the three evils of racism, poverty and militarism.
Daddy said a nation that year after year spends more on the military than on programs of social uplift may still go to hell. But King too, found seeds of hope, notably in the activism of recent student-led marches for tough gun control and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Source: PAI