Starting in the late 1950’s, UAW members joined Dr. King and many others in campaigns to end segregation and to expand civil rights throughout the country.
In 1961, then UAW President Walter Reuther invited Dr. King to speak at the UAW’s 25th Anniversary Dinner in Detroit. (You can listen to part of that speech here, but please note the audio file is copyrighted).
In 1963, King and other leaders of the civil rights movement, with backing from the UAW and other labor unions, were mobilizing to pass landmark civil rights legislation.
On June 23rd, 1963, as part of that fight, Dr. King delivered the Speech at the Great March on Detroit. King worked out of an office in Solidarity House, the UAW’s headquarters, while organizing the Detroit march; the speech he gave there is considered the first version of his now famous I Have a Dream Speech delivered to over 200,000 people attending the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.
A sourceLewis also thanked the union for its strong support in the fight for civil rights and for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Because of the bond between UAW President Walter Reuther and King, Lewis told delegates, the civil rights leader used an office at Solidarity House to write what would become his famous “I have a Dream Speech.”
And, said Lewis, it was the UAW that in 1963 marched first with King in Detroit and later in the march on Washington.
SourceWalter Reuther, UAW President (1946-1970)
During his years as a top labor leader, Reuther took forceful positions inside and outside the labor movement with regard to civil rights. He sat on the national advisory boards of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Congress of Racial Equality, urged union locals to participate in the May 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, joined the call for protests later that year against South Africa’s apartheid regime, and was a scheduled speaker at the May 1960 founding convention of the Negro American Labor Council. Reuther invited King to be a speaker at the 25th anniversary celebration of the UAW the following year, and in 1965 marched with King in the Selma to Montgomery March.
Reuther mobilized the UAW and other unions on behalf of the August 1963 March on Washington. He attempted to obtain the AFL-CIO’s endorsement for the march, but president George Meany’s tepid support caused Reuther to remark: ‘‘The statement is so anemic that you’d have to give it a blood transfusion to keep it alive on its way to the mimeograph machine’’ (Pomfret, ‘‘AFL-CIO Aloof’’). Reuther spoke at the event, and later that day said the event ‘‘proves beyond doubt … that free men despite their different points of view, despite their racial and religious differences, can unite on a great moral question like civil rights and the quest for equal opportunity and full citizenship rights’’ (King, et al., 28 August 1963). In March 1965 Reuther marched with King in Selma, Alabama.
After King’s assassination, Reuther marched with Coretta Scott King in Memphis on 8 April, in support of the peaceful resolution of that city’s sanitation strike, and donated the largest check from any outside source, $50,000, to the striking sanitation workers. When he and his wife were killed in a 1970 plane crash, Coretta Scott King eulogized Reuther, saying, ‘‘He was there in person when the storm clouds were thick’’ (Flint, ‘‘Reuther Praised’’).
Martin Luther King, Jr and the Global Freedom Struggle -- Stanford University
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