UAW Local 848's archives contain a long playing album donated by "Dusty"
Rhodes. It contains a speech by Walter Reuther when he was president of the
UAW and two speeches by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. This is a transcription
of one of King's speeches made by Gene Lantz:
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr speech at UAW 25th Anniversary Celebration
Cobo Hall, Detroit April 27, 1961
Introduced by Leonard Woodcock, VP of UAW. Woodcock describes the year long
boycott of Montgomery buses. King's book Stride Toward Freedom describes
one elderly woman who, asked if she was tired, said, "My feet are tired
but my soul is rested!"
//applause//
Dr King:
"Delegates and friends of UAW, ladies and gentlemen: I need not pause to
say how very delighted I am to be here this evening and to be a part of this
auspicious occasion.
I cannot stand here without giving just a word of thanks to this great union
for all that you have done across these 25 years. You have made life more meaningful
for millions of people and I am sure that America is a better place in which
to live as a result of the great work that has been done by UAW. You have given
to this nation a magnificent example of honest, democratic trade unionism, and
your great president, Walter Reuther will certainly go down in history as one
of the truly great persons of this generation.
//applause//
I bring greetings to you this evening from the hundreds and thousands, yea
millions of people in the Southland who are struggling for freedom and human
dignity. I bring greetings from the thousands of Negro students who have stood
up courageously against the principalities of segregation. For all of these
months they have moved in a uniquely meaningful orbit imparting light and heat
to distant satellites. And as a result of their nonviolent yet courageous struggle,
they have been able to bring about integration in more than 139 cities at the
lunch counters. //applause//
And I am sure that, when historians look back over this particular era of our
history, they will have to record this movement as one of the most significant
epics of our heritage. Now as I think with you tonight and think about this
significant occasion, I would like to open by saying "Labor has come a
long long way from the days of the strikebreaking injunctions of federal courts;
from the days of intimidations and firings in the plants; from the days that
your union leaders could be physically beaten with impunity. The clubs and the
claws of the heartless anti-labor forces have been clipped, and you now have
organizations of strength and intelligence to keep your interests from being
submerged and ignored. This is certainly the glorious meaning of your 25th anniversary.
Negroes who are now but beginning their march from the dark and desolate Egypt
of segregation and discrimination can gain from you real inspiration and encouragement
for the hard road still ahead. But though we have a multitude of problems almost
absorbing every moment of our time and consuming almost every ounce of our energies,
we cannot be unmindful of new problems confronting labor. And toward these problems
we are not neutral because they are our problems as well.
The autoworkers are facing hard core unemployment. New economic patterning,
through automation and relocation of plants is dissolving the nation's basic
industries. This is to me a catastrophe. We are neither technologically advanced
nor socially enlightened as a nation if we witness this disaster for tens of
thousands without finding a solution. And by a solution I mean a real and genuine
alternative providing the same living standards and opportunities which were
swept away by a force called progress. But which for many is destruction. The
society that performs miracles with machinery has the capacity to make some
miracles for men if it values men as highly as it values machines.
And this is really the crux of the problem. Are we as concerned for human values
and human resources as we are for material and mechanical values? The automobile
industry is not alone a production complex of assembly lines and steel forming
equipment. It is an industry of people who must live in decency with the security
for children, for old age, for health and a cultural life. It cannot be permitted
to become a blind monster which grinds out more cars and simultaneously snuffs
out the hopes and lives of the people by whom the industry was built. Perhaps
few people have kinship with autoworkers' labor as Negroes themselves, Because
we built a cotton economy for 300 years of slaves on which the nation grew powerful
and we still lack the most elementary rights of citizens or workers. We too
realize that when human values are subordinated to blind economic forces human
beings can become human scrap. Our kinship was not born however with the rise
of automation and the birth of your organization as you confronted recalcitrant
antagonists you forged new weapons appropriate to your fight.
Thus in the 30s, when industrial unionism sought recognition as a form of industrial
democracy, there were powerful forces which said to you the same words we as
Negroes hear now: "Never. You are not ready. You are really seeking to
change our form of society. You are reds. You are troublemakers. you are stirring
up discontent and discord where none exists. You are interfering with our property
rights. You are captives of sinister elements who would exploit you." Both
of us have heard these reckless charges. Both of us know that what we have sought
was simple basic needs without which no man is a whole person.
In your pursuit of these goals during the middle thirties you creatively stood
up for your fights by sitting down at your machines, just as our courageous
students are siting down at lunch counters across the South. And they screamed
at you. //applause//
They screamed at you and said that you were destroying property rights. But
nearly thirty years later the ownership of the automobile industry is still
in the hands of its stockholders and the value of its shares has multiplied
many fold, producing profits of awesome size. And we are proudly borrowing your
technique. And though those same old and tired threats and charges have been
dusted off for us we doubt that we shall collectivize a single lunch counter
or nationalize the consumption of sandwiches and coffee. //applause//
Because you persisted in your quest for the better life, you brought new horizons
to the whole nation. Industry after industry was compelled to civilize for the
whole nation.
Negroes need the same measures. Even more desperately for so many of us earn
less than one dollar and twenty five cents per hour.
Labor needs housing legislation. Labor needs legislation to protect it as a
consumer. Negroes need housing legislation also. Labor needs an adequate old
age medical care bill and so do Negroes. The list might be extended ad infinitum
for it is axiomatic that what labor needs, Negroes need.
Simple logic therefore puts us side by side in the struggle for all elements
of a decent standard of living. As we survey the problems of labor from the
chilling threat of automation to the needs of housing and social welfare generally
we confront the necessity to have a Congress responsible to liberal legislation.
And here again the kinship of interests of labor and the Negro people expresses
itself. Negroes need liberal congressmen if they are to realize equality and
opportunity. The campaign to grant the ballot to Negroes in the South has profound
implications. From all I have outlined it is clear that the Negro vote would
not be utilized in a vacuum. Negroes exercising of free suffrage would march
to the polls to support those candidates who would be partial to social legislation.
Negroes in the South whether they elected white or Negro congressmen would be
placing in office a liberal candidate, if you will a labor candidate. No other
political leader //applause//
No other political leader could have a program possessing appeal to Negroes
and these circumstances the campaign for Negro suffrage is both a fulfillment
of constitutional rights and a fulfillment of labor's needs in a fast changing
economy.
And therefore I feel justified in asking you for your continued support in the
struggle to achieve the ballot all over the nation and in the South in particular.
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. A new day will dawn which will see militant, steadfast
and reliable congressmen from the South joining those from the northern industrial
states who design and enact legislation for the people rather than for the privileged.
Now I need not say to you that this problem and all of the problems which we
face in the nation and in the world for that matter will not work itself out.
We know that if the problem is to be solved we must work to solve it. Evolution
may be true in the biological realm but when we seek to apply to the whole of
society there is very little evidence for it. Social progress never rolls in
on the wheels of inevitability it comes through the tireless efforts and the
persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work time itself
becomes the ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of social stagnation.
So in order to realize the American dream of economic justice and of the brotherhood
of man, men and women all over the nation must continue to work for it.
There are certain words that are used in every academic discipline and pretty
soon they become a part of the technical nomenclature of that discipline. Modern
psychology has a word that is probably used more than any word in modern psychology.
It is the word "maladjusted". This is the ringing pride of the new
child psychology "maladjusted" now certainly all of us are desirous
of living the well adjusted life in order to avoid the neurotic and schizophrenic
personalities, but if you will allow the preacher in me to come out now, let
me say that there are things within our social order to which I am proud to
be maladjusted and which I call upon you to continue to be maladjusted //applause//
I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never
intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself
to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries
to the few. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism or
the self defeating effects of physical violence.
For in a day when Sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and
guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere,
no nation can win a war. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence.
It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. So I am proud to be maladjusted ///applause//
It may well be that the salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.
So let us be maladjusted. As maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst
of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries,
"Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream".
As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation
could not exist half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson
who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out in words
lifted to cosmic proportions, "We hold these truths to be self evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with
certain unalienable rights." //applause//
And I believe that through such maladjustment we will be able to emerge from
the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into the bright and
glittering daybreak of freedom, justice and dignity for all men. If we will
continue to work and work with the faith that this dream can be realized, I
believe it will be realized. For although the arc of the moral university is
long, it bends toward justice. Before this dream is realized maybe some will
have to get scarred up. Before the dream is realized maybe some will have to
go to jail. Before the dream is realized maybe some will have to face physical
death, but if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children
from a permanent life of psychological death then nothing could be more honorable.
That is something in this universe ... //applause//
So we must continue to struggle for economic justice, the brotherhood of man, with the conviction that there is something in this universe which justifies Carlisle in saying no lie can live forever. There is something in this universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying "truth crushed to earth will rise again." And there in this universe which justifies James Russell Lowell in saying "truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet that scaffold sways the future. This is our hope, this is the faith that will carry us on. And if we will stand by this and continue to work for the ideal, we may be able to bring into being that new day. This will be the day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing anew with the Negro slaves of old: "Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last!" //applause//
UAW 848 photographer Jay Dunn took this shot of Corretta Scott King during a visit to Dallas.