AFSCME President on the Need for a 'Strong Army' to Advance Economic Justice and Civil Rights

[sheshe2]

AFSCME President Lee Saunders on the Need for a 'Strong Army' to Advance Economic Justice and Civil Rights

The American Federation of Service, City and Municipal Employees will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike by training labor organizers to tackle income inequality and racial disparity via the "I Am 2018" campaign.



snip//

Almost 50 years later, AFSCME announced the launch of the I Am 2018 campaign to commemorate the legacy of Dr. King and the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike. On the anniversary of Dr. King’s death, AFSCME will begin training thousands of labor organizers and activists around the country to address poverty, income inequality and racial disparity. Recently, Colorlines spoke with AFSCME president Lee Saunders to learn more about I Am 2018, and discuss the issues that are still paramount to the labor and racial justice movements.

As part of the campaign launch, AFSCME released the video below with archival audio from Dr. King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, paired with images of protest from the 1968 strike to the present.

How did you decide to use the “I am” theme for the campaign? 
In 1968, the sanitation workers and their allies came up with a slogan, and it was “I am a man.” That slogan simply meant that they weren’t going to be treated as second-class citizens anymore. They were demanding to be treated with dignity and respect. Although we’ve come a long way since 1968, we still have a long way to go, and the theme is still very appropriate. So next year, the call is “I Am 2018.” And it’s going to take all of us as a community to come together and to fight back against what’s occurring in Charlottesville and across the country. The poison that’s being spread by the neo-Nazis, the White nationalists, the bigots and the racists—we’ve got to come together and say this is not what this country should be about. This is not what Dr. King stood for. This is not what the sanitation workers stood for in 1968, and we’re going to make our voices heard. We want this to be huge event, not only in Memphis, but also across the country. And [for it to] not stop on April 4 and say, okay, we’ve done what we need to do. The fight and the struggle will continue well beyond April 4 of 2018. We want to develop a strong army of people who will go back to their communities and talk about economic justice, civil rights and human rights for all and make the rallying cry. We believe this is the moment to do so.

This July, the City of Memphis made moves to compensate some of those workers from the 1968 strike who never received retirement benefits. They gave 14 of the surviving strikers $50,000 in tax free grants, and announced that improvements would be made for current employees. What are some issues we are still seeing today that are, in some ways, a legacy of 1968?

Read More: http://www.colorlines.com/articles/afscme-president-lee-saunders-need-strong-army-advance-economic-justice-and-civil-rights?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+racewireblog+%28Colorlines.com%29

Economic Justice. Civil Rights. Human Rights....the rallying cry...2018