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1 Copyright 1997 by Julian Bond February 27, 1997

Labor Teach-in

In 1961, when Martin Luther King, Jr., adressed the Fourth Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO, he spoke of the "unity of purpose" between the labor movement and the movement for civil rights. He said:

Our needs ar eidentical with labor's needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.

The duality of interests of labor and Negoes [King say] makes any crisis which lacerates you a crisis from which we bleed. As we stand on the threshold of the second half of the twentieth century, a crisis confronts us both.1

Now, as we stand on the threshold of the birth of the twenty-first century, a crisis confronts us once again.

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