Completing the Agenda of Dr. King (Ebony, June 1974)
Completing the Agenda of Dr. King
Operation PUSH President Outlines “Save the Worker” Plans
By the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson
Article originally appeared in the June 1974 issue of Ebony Magazine.
Transcribed for historical/educational purposes.
Six years ago, the nation and the world mourned the loss of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Our state of grief was traumatic and real as we pondered the meaning of his assassination. We now understand that his murder was a pivotal act in a strategy designed to break up, dissolve and scatter the coalition of progressive forces in our country that had won civil rights and abolished the racist insult of segregation.
Six years ago, the moral lights were snuffed out around us as demagogues and political assassins infused hopelessness and despair into the climate of a presidential election. When Dr. King was murdered in Memphis, we lost a great prophet who had done much to bring democracy within the reach of millions of blacks and other non-white and poor citizens. We lost a man who told the truth at a level where it shaped the nation’s conscience and attitude and challenged the congenital deformity of racism in America. We also lost a great mobilizer – a force which coalesced divergent groups into a visible and viable movement for humanity. His tragic death by political assassination served to disintegrate and halt the movement he helped to initiate and build. Many who had followed him lost hope. They became bitter, despondent and cynical. Often cloaked in blind rage, they dropped his agenda, his plan for progress and peace.
On April 4 of this year, in the city where the prophet died, our Operation PUSH satellite mobilized thousands of people in a great demonstration of hope and determination. We in PUSH are about the serious business of resurrecting the agenda for which Dr. King gave his life – to “Save the Worker.” The threefold goal of our movement at this point in history is to secure the jobs of those already working (that has to be where we hold the line), to get the unemployed employed, and to get those working but not making a livable wage organized. That has to be the three-pronged thrust of our Civil Economics Movement.
Undergirding this basic economic thrust is the need to organize consumer power represented by the $51 billion per year in wages and salaries which the black community now earns. We must see that this money keeps circulating and gets institutionalized in the form of the growth of black-owned businesses and financial institutions. As workers and professionals, the black population is concentrated in the large urban centers of the country. In every one of these areas our children are the majority of those attending the public schools. How much of the insurance carried on our children by the various state and local school boards is with black-owned insurance companies? This combination of concerns, jobs and the building up of institutions in our communities embraces the self-interest of the total community and is the basis for total community involvement.
Just as we are moving toward making basic progress with our economic thrust for “silver rights,” along comes the “energy crisis” hoax, and it cuts into the livelihood of the workers in basic industries. Layoffs among automobile workers and in such industries as airlines and plastics cut at the very heart of the wage economy of the black community.
There were more than a million blacks unemployed before the “energy crisis” was announced. It is important to understand what this latest aggravation of depression conditions means for us. Though there are more than one million unemployed blacks, there are approximately 8¼ million blacks who go to work every day. If we can move our employment level up toward the 10 million mark, it will mean that, with a total Afro-American population of 30 million, about one out of every three blacks would be gainfully employed to ensure a livable wage for everyone who works, our economic condition would be greatly improved. On the other hand, if we allow the present number of employed to slip from 8¼ million to say, six million we will be in very serious trouble and will experience a drastic drop in our living standards. That is the direction toward which the “energy crisis” hoax threatens to push us.
In many of the key industries, we have only recently won a foothold – during the last decade or so. Thus we have very little job seniority. The old rule of “last hired, first fired still prevails. Seventy-five years ago we couldn’t vote because of the “grandfather clause” in politics. Now there is a “grandfather clause” in the labor market. If you don’t have seniority if you are not a “grandfather” in the industry, then you may lose your job. This especially punishes young workers because, obviously, they don’t have seniority. And it punishes women because many of them have just won jobs in key industries. Everyone is affected; a cross-section of persons is trapped in a most crucial situation.
On a recent trip to the Budd Automotive plant in Philadelphia, we saw black men and women making and welding doors for trucks. Then we went to the General Motors Corp. Vega plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and saw computerized machines doing the same welding job. By traveling to various plants, we have become aware of conditions that one would never learn about through the major new media.
There are thousands of auto workers unemployed and walking the streets of Detroit, Lansing and Flint, Mich. Many people have been deceived to think that they have been furloughed when, in fact, they have been fired. They will not get those jobs back. Many of them have had a delayed feeling of apprehension because they are getting 95 per cent of their pay through supplementary unemployment benefits – but only if they have been working several years. Those who were hired only last year are fired this year. And, of course, there is no indefinite period for receiving unemployment compensation; with each passing week it begins to diminish. Thus one can see that the energy hoax has the potential of throwing us into a crisis greater than what we have experienced before.
Operation PUSH has become deeply involved in efforts to save people’s jobs and to make them aware of the adverse effects of the energy hoax on black communities. Too many blacks have considered the energy issue as “a white man’s thing” which black people could choose to ignore. The truth is that the issue affects black people all the way from not having enough gasoline to drive great distances to jobs in the suburbs, to not having enough heat for the flimsy buildings in which many blacks are forced to live, to the whole catalogue of adversities caused by inflation and job layoffs which manipulation of the energy issue has already caused.
Black people must not merely become aware of every aspect of this issue, they must take steps to protect themselves. We are urging workers to resist layoff from their jobs – no matter what reasons are given 0 and to challenge their unions to fight for effective “no layoff” clauses in union contracts. We at PUSH also take the position that there should be a moratorium on bill payments for anyone who has been layed off from his or her job, and that every worker should receive unemployment compensation until he is recycled back into the economy is not the fault of the workers, we remind, and every able-bodied man and woman has the right to a job.
We are aware that the “energy hoax” will eventually run its course – although we may be paying from 60¢ to 75¢ a gallon for gasoline by that time. But the basic economic rights outlined above must nevertheless be won. Whether the worker is an airline pilot or a skycap, whether a nurse or a longshoreman, that worker cannot pay bills and provide for a family and live in dignity when there are no jobs. Further, without the protection of legislation allowing for a moratorium on payment of major bills, and without extended unemployment compensation, millions of persons could lose their homes, could lose their on-the-job health insurance and might even have to remove their children from schools. Their entire fundamental base for economic survival could be ripped off. Thus it is in pursuit of the goals of securing the jobs that black people already hold, of returning the unemployed to the labor force, and of organizing the unorganized workers that Operation PUSH has become so deeply involved. We have alerted the areas where there are satellites of PUSH – the various large industrial areas – and the work that we have initiated is taking place in many parts of the country. It is no longer confined to Chicago, nor is it confined to where I can physically go. People at the local levels have gotten the message! Ministers and local leaders of PUSH in a number of communities are visiting with workers in industrial plants as a regular style of organization – and that I will bring good results. In this regard, I am especially encouraged by the number of young, able ministers who are coming forward to take up the mantle of leadership. They are carrying on, in a bold and dedicated way, the revolutionary, democratic traditions of the Black Church. In Memphis there is Rev. S. Billy Kyles, PUSH’s southern regional vice president; in Cincinnati there is Rev. Otis Moss, Midwest regional vice president; in Philadelphia there is Rev. Charles Walker; in Columbus, Ohio, there is Rev. Charles Adams. They and a number of others are guaranteeing that our Movement shall be reconnected to its church base during this most crucial period. A slow rebirth is also taking place among white ministerial leadership, some of which I met at Yale Divinity School during a recent lecture series. All these ministers, black and white, are in the vanguard of a new generation of ministers who, in the prophetic tradition, are committed to be watchmen on the wall in carrying the “good news to the captive.”
Part of that “good news” is that Operation PUSH has not been, and connect ever be, a one-issue organization. For whereas the energy situation affects us today, tomorrow will bring another situation with which black people will have to deal. Our current involvement in exposing the energy hoax will result, we hope, in stimulating public awareness that inflation and tax robbery and unemployment are chronic feature of the U.S. economy. Our understanding of this is what determines our New Agenda.
Dr. King once made a profound assessment of the Civil Rights Era of our movement. He said: “The real significance of the civil rights struggle is the effects which it had on the psyche of the black man. We armed ourselves with the armor of dignity and respect; we straightened up our backs.” There is a great lesson in that experience for organized labor today. Organized labor is challenged in this period of severe economic crisis to straighten up its back and regain the moral authority it once enjoyed when it, too, was a movement as well as an organization. We draw upon the spirit of struggle embodied in Dr. King’s work when we declare that if we do not join forces to rebuild the human rights coalition the American people will wallow in economic deprivation and moral and spiritual decay for generations to come.
The glory of work is an untold American story. That it is untold is not an accident in a society whose economic system rests upon exploiting labor for private profits. Yet the need to work is a human reality – the need to feel useful, to be productive, to be recognized and compensated for work produced. Gainful employment is the basic alternative to welfare. It tends to deter crime, because people working in the plants tend not to deal with dope, tend not to end up in jail, tend to be homebodies and car-owners and to send their children to school. They represent the backbone of the economic life of the black community.
The black experience is overcoming odds, not succumbing to odds. The black experience is working but not getting adequately paid for the work that we do. We have always been what they call “happy people” not because we were silly but because we were always spiritually fulfilled; there is fulfillment in work. It is work that has always given us an inner sense of self-confidence, and that is why one of the greatest enemies that ever came to Afro-Americans was the present welfare system. I might add that, in the South, blacks could not get on welfare until the 1960s. That was a good experience, because even though my grandmother was working in white folks’ kitchens and was not receiving much money, she got the satisfaction of being able to keep her dignity. She knew that she deserved more than she received. That was the self-esteem. The great tragedy of the mother on welfare and the suburban housewife (and incidentally there are three whites on welfare for each black, so I don’t use welfare and blacks synonymously) is that both of them receive a check and neither is gainfully employed. One receives it from her husband and the other from the state. But neither has the satisfaction that comes from useful work.
The New Agenda of our movement is designed to give hope where there is now a sense of hopelessness and to mobilize into a mass movement those who are now immobilized by cynicism. The enlightened strategy of mass movement building requires that coalitions at the local community level be formed around issues, regardless of ethnicity: blacks in cooperation with Mexican Americans (Chicanos), Puerto Ricans, “American Indians.” Asian Americans – all the diverse segments of the population which also experienced much of the “benign neglect” that has been our experience, and who seek a constructive way out of the present crisis. In this regard we must give special recognition to the significance of women workers and the role they are playing today in clearing away the darkness and giving leadership to the struggle for regenerating America. This is particularly true of the recently organized Coalition of Labor Union Women which is destined to have a profoundly positive effect on organized labor in the struggle for a civilized society in our country.
The Watergate flood is surely destined to drown the wicked, but the righteous must organize an Ark. The multi-ethnic coalition we propose must mobilize around a New Agenda of economic rights. It cannot afford to allow itself to be led into the kind of trap that narrows our options down to choosing between a variety of Republican and Democratic Party presidential candidates – each of whom is trying to get George Wallace on his ticket. This kind of unprincipled compromise can only lead the nation into a kind of betrayal such as was seen in 1876 when the first Reconstruction was overthrown in the South. That betrayal at the presidential level carried America back into the dark ages of Ku Klux Klan terror and psychological depression.
We are moving toward 1976 with a clear vision and a sense of power. Our commitment to finish Dr. King’s unfinished agenda is a commitment to guarantee a progressive and civilized future for ourselves and our children.
