It is always a unique delight to look at a document written by someone who had a profound impact on history.
I experienced that joy this week while I was looking through a file of documents and was surprised to find a letter written by Coretta Scott King.
In April 1976 King wrote to J. Bill Becker, the president of the Arkansas AFL-CIO. Becker and other allies had launched an effort to repeal the state’s right-to-work law–a measure approved in 1944 that prevented a union or agency shop. Becker wanted to put the matter directly to Arkansas voters via a ballot initiative in November, and he needed all the support he could get.
Becker must have been delighted to read King’s words. She urged “all people who believe in equality and democracy” to support organized labor’s effort. It was a matter of both economic and civil rights, she argued, and invoked a man who cared deeply about both. “My husband fought against Right to Work laws and any other measures designed to prevent blacks and others from effective organizing,” she pointed out. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been in the midst of organizing the Poor People’s Campaign and was in Memphis, Tennessee–another state with a right-to-work law–when his life was cut short just eight years before Becker’s efforts to amend Arkansas’s law.
One thing that struck me about King’s letter is how she noted that right-to-work laws created two different experiences for workers in the United States. Some states allowed workers to vote for union representation and form a bargaining unit to collectively negotiate terms of employment. The “right-to-work” states undermined this right.
I read King’s framing here as an echo of how she and others in the African American freedom struggle argued against racial segregation. Jim Crow had created second-class citizens. King argued that Arkansas’s right-to-work law had similar consequences.
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