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speak to an empty field at the March on Washington. There were thousands marching with him and before him, and thousands more who did the dirty work that preceded the triumphant march.

Black Americans really didn't just march to freedom. We worked our way to civil rights through the difficult business of organizing: knocking on doors, one by one. Registering voters, one by one. Creating a community organization, block by block. Financing the cause of social justice, dollar by dollar. Building a statewide movement, town by town. Creating an interracial coalition, nationwide.

Yesterday's movement succeeded because the victims became their own best champions. When Rosa Parks refused to stand up on a Montgomery bus, and when Martin Luther King stood up to speak, mass participation came to the movement for civil rights.

In the same way, the labor movement was built on sacrifice, hard work and organizing. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, writing about the 1982 campaign to unionize the nation's largest nursing home chain, for example, said, "We went after [them] (Beverly) with every weapon at our disposal. While local unions organized workers at the nursing homes one by one, their efforts were aided by a coordinated campaign strategy. What we did was tell the truth: patients as well as workers were suffering from substandard conditions."3

What we did in the civil rights movement was tell the truth. William Cullen Bryant was right when he said, "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." And James Russell Lowell was right when