To Members of the United Packinghouse Workers of America
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: May 17, 1961
Location: Atlanta, Ga.
Genre: Letter
Topic: Labor Movement
Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views
Details
King writes an open letter to members of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), who raised over $11,000 in the first “Fund for Democracy” campaign to benefit SCLC in October 1957.1 Touting the success of SCLC’s leadership training program and voter registration and direct action campaigns, King claims that his organization’s methods “make up the cutting edge of our attempt to tackle America’s most grievous problems.” Concluding, King notes the solidarity between the labor and civil rights movement, arguing that the struggle “could not continue nor expand were it not for our friends, who understand so well that the struggle of which we are a part is of great importance not only to us, but to the destiny of our nation, and perhaps our world.”2 By the 15 June 1961 deadline, the UPWA’s drive netted $14,565.27 of its $25,000 goal.3
Members of United Packing House Workers of America
608 Dearborn Street
Chicago, Illinois
Attention: Mr. Ralph Helstein4
Dear Friends of Freedom:
It gives me great pleasure to know that the members of the United Packing House Workers of America are again instituting a Fund for Democracy. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference greatly benefited from your last fund, and your generous gift was really the means by which our then infant organization was able to begin its work across the south.
Since that time, SCLC has become more definitely structured and is working untiringly to achieve freedom and human dignity for Negro people in the south. We now have almost fifty affiliate organizations covering every southern state.
From the beginning, SCLC has taken a primary interest in voter registration. The campaign to gain the ballot for Negroes in the south has profound implications. It will liberalize the total political structure of the nation. Negroes exercising a free sufferage would march to the polls to support those candidates who would be partial to social legislation. Negroes in the south, whether they elected Negro or white Congressmen, would be placing in office a liberal candidate. Here we can see the kinship of interests of labor and the Negro people. By extending the ballot to the Negro in the south, it will be much easier for labor to organize and establish a Congress which would be more responsive to liberal legislation. We, the Negro people, and labor, by extending the frontiers of Democracy to the south, inevitably will sow the seeds of liberalism where reaction has flourished unchallenged for decades. For all of these reasons we in SCLC contend that one of the most important steps the Negro can take is that short walk to the voting booth. Just the other day in our annual Board meeting, we voted to intensify our efforts in voter registration so that the vote of the southern Negro would be profoundly effective in the 1962 Congressional election.5
Aside from intensified work in voter registration, we are continuing our efforts in non-violent direct action. It has been demonstrated again and again that SCLC played a great role in giving direction to the sit-in movement of 1960 that still continues. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the coordinating organization of the student movement, was born as a result of a conference called by SCLC at Raleigh, North Carolina, in the spring of 1960.6 Some of the most significant victories of the sit-in movement of southern college students have come as a result of the leadership and guidance of SCLC affiliates, e.g. The Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NBC White Paper #2), The Petersburg Improvement Association (Look, August 30, 1960; Life, September 12, 1960).7
Since August 1, our staff has been expanded and we have embarked on a bold new approach to solving our human relations problems in the south.8 We call this our Leadership Training Program.9 It is directed at bringing together at some central place in the south the second-line leadership of our protest communities, and training them in the skills of adult education. They then return to their respective communities and set up citizenship schools to train the “grass roots” population in the basic skills required for achieving full citizenship. This program is already operative and has been declared by the Health, Education and Welfare Department of the United States as one of the best known in this phase of adult education.
Our activity in voter registration, the use of the non-violent philosophy as a means of creative protest in an action program, and our Leadership Training Program make up the cutting edge of our attempt to tackle America’s most grievous problems. We are faced with the task of attacking the causes of segregation and at the same time giving our hands to healing the effects of segregation.
We see a striking parallel in the present struggle of the Negro Community and that of organized labor some years ago. You were faced then with providing every individual worker at the bench with the right to a fair living wage and relief from the misery and misfortune of economic exploitation; the Negro community is faced with the herculean task of securing the right of the ballot for every citizen by which he may relieve himself of the misery and humiliation of the evil system of segregation. Both struggles are permeated with a genuine concern for the individual and an exaltation of the human personality.
Our work could not continue nor expand were it not for our friends, who understand so well that the struggle of which we are a part is of great importance not only to us, but to the destiny of our nation, and perhaps our world.
Very sincerely yours,
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
[signed] Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
President
Km
1. King to Executive Board Members, 8 October 1957. Russell R. Lasley, vice president of the UPWA, forwarded King’s letter to district directors and local unions, asking them to urge members to donate to the campaign (Lasley to Local Unions, 9 June 1961; Lasley to District Directors, 9 June 1961).
2. As a member of the AFL-CIO’s Public Review Advisory Committee since 1959, King reviewed in February 1961 an investigative report on alleged communist infiltration of the UPWA (King to Nathan Paul Feinsinger, 6 February 1961, pp. 150–151 in this volume).
3. Lasley to District Directors, 20 September 1961; Lasley to Local Unions, 9 June 1961. Because the union did not meet its intended goal, the drive was extended and the union raised $22,326 by 1962 (Harry L. Alston to G. R. Hathaway, 8 February 1968).
4. Ralph Helstein (1908–1985), born in Duluth, Minnesota, received a B.A. (1929) and law degree (1934) from the University of Minnesota. In 1942 he was named general counsel for the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (later the UPWA), and he served as international president of the UPWA from 1946 until the union’s merger with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union in 1968. In June 1964 Helstein joined a small group of King’s closest advisors known as the “research committee,” and periodically offered King advice through conference calls and private meetings.
5. SCLC’s executive board met in Montgomery, Alabama, 10–11 May 1961.
6. Ella Baker, interim director of SCLC from 1959–1960 and veteran civil rights organizer, invited college students who had participated in the early 1960 sit-ins to a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Easter weekend, 15–17 April 1960. At Shaw, the students voted to establish a temporary coordinating body, which became the permanent Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). For more on SCLC’s involvement in the founding of SNCC, see Introduction in Papers 5:26–27.
7. “Sit-in,” the second of NBC’s White Paper documentary series, was broadcast 20 December 1960, and reported on the movement for desegregation of public accommodations in Nashville, Tennessee. The Petersburg Improvement Association was featured in “Schools for Sit-Ins,” Look, 30 August 1960, pp. 78–81. The Life magazine article discussed the efforts of protesters to desegregate downtown Jacksonville, Florida (“Racial Fury over Sit-Ins,” Life, 12 September 1960, p. 37). Although King offered to make a visit to Jacksonville, his proposal was rejected by the local NAACP. For more on King and the Jacksonville movement, see Introduction in Papers 5:34–35.
8. In August 1960 three members of the Petersburg Improvement Association joined the SCLC staff: Wyatt Tee Walker, executive director; James R. Wood, administrative assistant; and Dorothy Cotton, an administrative assistant who later became education director of SCLC’s Citizenship Education Program.
9. The May 1961 edition of the SCLC Newsletter described voter registration as a primary goal of the newly launched Leadership Training and Citizenship School programs, which initially brought together members of SCLC affiliate organizations to Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, to learn how to teach “Reading and Writing, Civics, Simplified Politics, the Philosophy of Nonviolence, Picketing, and other subjects necessary for understanding How our Nation Works” (Newsletter 1, no. 1, May 1961).
Source: UPWR-WHi, United Packinghouse, Food and Allied Workers Records, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis.