Here are 4 battles Martin Luther King, Jr. waged against injustice that conservatives love to...

As we celebrate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. this Monday, many will look to his incredible body of work fighting for civil rights throughout the 1960s. But King was not a single issue activist. In fact, he felt that many issues lead back to civil rights for all people that he felt were at a disadvantage due to a system of oppression.

Here are four major issues that King fought for and his profound words on them that often go unnoticed:
1. Labor unions

“I AM A MAN!” the signs they held read. African American men marched in the spring of 1968 through the streets of Memphis. They were sanitation workers on strike, and with them stood Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “The issue is injustice,” he told those at the Mason Temple the day before he was assassinated. “The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we’ve got to keep attention on that…That’s the question before you tonight. Not, ‘If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?’ The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me? … If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’ That’s the question…”

Dr. King knew that the rights of workers were connected to civil rights. The intrinsic value of people and the work that we all do is diminished when we are disrespected. Thanks to Dr. King, leaders of the strike were finally able to negotiate with the bosses. The workers got paid holidays and vacations for the first time ever. Their wages were previously so low that 40 percent of the workers qualified for welfare and with these negotiations, the workers finally had adequate raises. Promotions were no longer based on race or manipulation but on seniority, so African Americans were finally in supervisory positions for the first time.

2. Family planning and women’s rights

While Martin Luther King, Jr. was a profoundly religious man of God, he believed very strongly in family planning and birth control. Reproductive choices are the civil rights of women, King explained. Every woman has the right to govern her own health care decisions.





Report Advertisement
There is nothing the right-wing loves to do more than portray Planned Parenthood as some kind of racist hate group. It could not be further from the truth, and King himself explained why. King went so far as to agree to be on a Planned Parenthood committee for a study on contraception in 1960. His letter of support read, “I have always been deeply interested in and sympathetic with the total work of the Planned Parenthood Federation.” King powerfully described his support for Margaret Sanger and the women’s movement by saying,
3. Poverty

King’s final message before his untimely death was addressing poverty as a civil rights issue. Too often his anti-poverty legacy is overshadowed because solutions to poverty are more difficult to understand and accomplish. He launched the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968 with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and with Ralph Abernathy the campaign continued past King’s death.

While President Johnson started the War on Poverty in 1964, four years later it wasn’t working out. A 3,000-person Occupy-style tent city was set up on the Washington Mall as part of a citizen-lead lobbying effort to get Congress to meet their demands. King wanted the government to eradicate poverty and guarantee all Americans had a job that ensured a secure middle-class income. Less than a month before his death, King spoke in Grosse Pointe, Michigan about “The Other America.” The unemployment statistics were staggering and among African Americans long-term unemployment was a flat-out embarrassment.
4. An end to war

King was not merely anti-war he was also heavily anti-military. His philosophy for nonviolence wasn’t just a resistance tool used by protesters, he applied it to all fascets of his politics and did so globally as well. At the River­side Church in New York City in April of 1967, King said, “the re­cent state­ment of your ex­ec­ut­ive com­mit­tee are the sen­ti­ments of my own heart and I found my­self in full ac­cord when I read its open­ing lines: ‘A time comes when si­lence is be­tray­al.'” King wasn’t talking about the civil-rights movement. “That time has come for us in re­la­tion to Vi­et­nam,” he continued.

Later that month, nearly a country away in Atlanta, King took it even further,