Portside

Reader Comments - March on Washington; Even McDonald's Thinks Its Workers Need $15; NLRB, Chris Hedges and the Pequod; Labor & Obamacare; Greens and Fracking; Saving Underwater Homes at the Local Level; Low-Wage Workers; R.I.P. - Fred Hicks (Louisville); Henri Alleg - Journalist who revealed French torture in Algeria; Announcements: Pastor's Message to Cuba; Celebrate Nelson Mandela's Life - Berkeley - July 21; Confronting the Climate Crisis - San Francisco - Aug 2

The March on Washington grew out of a clear understanding of the problems facing African Americans, and presented a discrete list of demands, including a comprehensive and effective civil rights law that would guarantee access to public accommodations, "decent housing, adequate and integrated education, and the right to vote." Also a "massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers - Negro and white - on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages"

The calls for stricter gun control laws are not enough. Although the gun murder rate in some large cities is down, the causes of urban gun violence remain the real problem. At the June 1966 gang summit, Dr. King asked Chicago’s gangs to channel their energies into nonviolent protest of poverty and inequality. He tried to imprint upon the young men gathered at the Sheraton that violence was futile, and would likely get them nowhere but a grave or a prison cell.

What kind of South do we want? The Voting Rights Act was a key engine of Southern progress, leveling the political playing field but also improving the South's image and economic success. If conservatives push too hard, it may help tilt the electorate in ways that helps score some quick political victories. In the short term, these attacks could be a spark to mobilize African-American, Asian-American, Latino, young and urban voters to head to the polls in 2014.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which occurred fifty years ago this August 28, remains one of the most successful mobilizations ever created by the American Left. Organized by a coalition of trade unionists, civil rights activists, and feminists—most of them African American and nearly all of them socialists—the protest drew nearly a quarter-million people to the nation’s capital. Yet the Left has not claimed the March as its legacy.

45 years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered this speech in support of the striking sanitation workers at Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters), Memphis, Tennessee on April 3, 1968 - the day before he was assassinated.

Fast Food Workers Stand Up on 45th Anniversary of Assassination of MLK; Readers Comments on: 1963 March on Washington; BRICS; NCAA; Labor Law Loses Its Watchdog; Media Bits and Bytes; Reader Apprciation. Rally for Immigration Reform - Jersey City - Apr 6; The Safety Net, Sequestration and Austerity Politics - NYC - Apr 8; US Prison Industrial Complex: A Labor Issue? - NYC - Apr 18; Dred Scott Heritage Foundation. In Memoriam: Leo Robinson; Stephen Coats; Harry Kelber

Forty-five years after King was killed supporting their historic strike, some of the same men who marched with him still pick up Memphis' garbage - and now they are fighting to hold on to jobs that some city leaders want to hand over to a private company.