King Was Really a Labor Leader, Too

For one of the country’s greatest orators, Martin Luther King Jr. rarely gets his say on labor. It’s as if some keepers of his flame don’t want to hear him say that we are not free at last until labor can check capital.

Yet even they must know, if only dimly, that the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963, began as a labor march, a project of A. Philip Randolph, who was president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a vice president of the AFL-CIO. The co-chairmen of the march were Randolph and Walter Reuther, the fiery social democrat who led the United Automobile Workers. Reuther and the UAW put up much of the dough to rent the buses and put people on the planes. Even more important was Bayard Rustin, the grand strategist of the civil-rights movement: Rustin began as a labor organizer and got much of his funding in the 1960s from the AFL-CIO.