In the mid-1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was drawing his movement’s focus away from civil rights and towards economic justice. As African Americans were moving into cities and jobs and factories were moving elsewhere, Dr. King believed the civil rights movement was intertwined with the labor-union movement, which was trying to raise wages and improve working conditions.
Here is Dr. King speaking in March 1968:
...Most of the poverty-stricken people in this country are working everyday. They are making wages so inadequate that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of the nation. They are working full-time jobs for part-time income.
When he was assassinated a month later, Dr. King was in Memphis, Tennessee, organizing his “Poor People’s Campaign” and preparing for a march to support striking sanitation workers. Just days after his death, his widow, Coretta Scott King, led a march in Memphis with those same workers. A year later, she came to Baltimore to speak to the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union (District 1199), which was seeking the right to represent hospital workers.
Mrs. King told the Baltimore Sun: “I regard this election as tremendously important in the struggle to wipe out poverty wages and win a measure of self-respect and dignity for all Baltimore hospital workers.”
To understand the connection between the civil rights and worker rights movements here in Baltimore, producer Jonna McKone spoke with long-time activist Bob Moore – who was honored with an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement Award by the City of Baltimore Community Relations Commission in 2000. McKone also sat down with Annie Henry and Laura Pugh, two members of the 1199 (now called The National Health Care Workers Union) who met Coretta Scott King in the late 1960s.
