Friday afternoon, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Local Union 613, hosted their annual Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. breakfast at their Pulliam St. headquarters. Senators Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock were in attendance. They were joined by Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond and Atlanta City Council President Doug Shipman. Additionally, Ambassador Andrew Young and Wanda Cooper-Jones, the mother of Ahmaud Arbery, were in attendance. 

Dr. King was a supporter of labor unions. He traveled to Memphis against the advice of his closest advisors because he wanted to argue for the improvement of working conditions for sanitation workers. Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed by a faulty garbage truck compactor as they sought shelter from a rainstorm in the back of the truck on February 1, 1968. After that, 1,300 Black sanitation workers formed a union and went on strike.

“That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth,” King said in a speech in December 1961.

King led a march on Beale Street on March 28, 1968, that turned violent when police and protesters clashed. He would deliver his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech at the Mason Temple which essentially foretold his death the following day at the Lorraine Motel.

Those historical facts were not lost on the minds of the attendees of Friday’s brunch. 

“Three years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and four years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which…