Dayton Miami Valley AFL-CIO

After eight years in which “critical civil rights protections gathered dust,” the Obama administration has made enforcement of civil rights laws a major priority, the nation’s top civil rights official said over the weekend.

Thomas Perez, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, told the AFL-CIO King Day celebration in Greensboro, N.C., which ended Jan. 18:

In 2010, we have an African American president. And yet discrimination persists—both blatant discrimination and the dangerously subtle kind—in so many of our institutions, showing up in our schools, in our workplaces, in our health care system, in our financial system. 

Saying the union and civil rights movements share the same goals, Perez, the son of Dominican immigrants, added:

Over the last century, those two movements have learned from each other, have helped each other and have changed our nation into one where more people have access to the promise of equal opportunity. 

Read excerpts from Perez’s speech in his Point of View column here.

	Union members in Little Rock, Ark., took part in that city’s King Day parade.

In addition to the celebration in Greensboro, working Americans across the country from Seattle to Chicago to Little Rock, Ark., to Atlanta held roundtables, marches and rallies to remind their lawmakers that King’s vision for the nation included not only civil rights but also an economy that served all Americans—a vision that is far from fulfilled.

In Joliet, Ill., clergy and other religious leaders announced a boycott to restore justice to a group of Bissell warehouse workers who were fired last year when they blew the whistle on violations at their workplace.

The workers were fired en masse after filing legal complaints over the many violations of state and  federal law in the warehouse and announcing to management that they were forming a union.

More than 400 union activists took part in the Greensboro celebration, which focused on economic justice. In workshops and speeches, the activists made the point that King’s dream of a better, more equal America must include good, meaningful jobs.

Participants honored the four trailblazing men whose sit-in 50 years ago at the Woolworth’s whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro ignited a nationwide effort that resulted in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker and AFGE President John Gage addressed the participants, along with Rebecca Blank, undersecretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Commerce Department.  

Community service is a major portion of each year’s King Day celebration, putting into action the union values of collective assistance for those in need. This year, participants sorted and distributed donated goods to local homeless shelters.

A town hall meeting on the jobs crisis highlighted the need for economic justice, and participants discussed the AFL-CIO’s five-point plan to save and create millions of jobs in the next year, especially in the nation’s most distressed communities where the population is primarily people of color.

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