Claire Deng ’22 was doing a survey of archival papers last summer at a library in the ILR School when she came across something unexpected.
As the collections survey assistant at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, she had been combing through thousands of boxes of archives since 2023 to evaluate their contents.
In one, she found the transcript of a speech given at a meatpacking union conference in Chicago, in 1957. The speaker: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
He delivered the remarks at a moment when he had just come to national prominence and was emphasizing the connections between workers’ rights and civil rights.
“It was a really serendipitous moment,” Deng said. “I was very skeptical that I had found something actually important.”
She had: It is one of only two known transcripts of the speech. And it is the missing puzzle piece to other Kheel holdings discovered in 2022, including a rare one-minute audio excerpt and photos of King speaking at the conference – perhaps the only color shots of that event in existence. Only the Wisconsin Historical Society has the same materials; their photos are black and white.
“This transcript is very important – it is one of the earliest materials that we have from Dr. King’s involvement with unions,” said Steven Calco, interim assistant director at the Kheel Center, in Catherwood Library, which is part of Cornell University Library and located in the ILR School.
“It’s probably one of the biggest things that I’ve found in my survey so far,” Deng said. “It’s really validating of the work we’re doing to surface and re-describe materials in our collections.”
King gave the speech Oct. 2, 1957, at a conference of the United Packinghouse Workers of America. The union had a substantial membership of Black workers, who dominated the meatpacking plants in the Midwest. It also had rural white workers as members and sought to end racial discrimination in meatpacking plants. King had spoken to UPWA workers before, when they supported the Montgomery bus boycott. At the conference, King accepted a check for $11,000 – worth about $123,500 today – that the union had raised in local contributions for the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
King had just become a national figure when he gave the speech. Several months earlier, in February 1957, he became president of the SCLC. And he had appeared on the cover of Time magazine for his work on the yearlong bus boycott, which had ended just a few months earlier, in December 1956.
King spoke to labor unions throughout his career, Calco said, and had a long history of supporting unions.
“He always compares civil rights and the labor movement as twin movements fighting the same forces that oppress working people,” he said. “King felt that economic justice and racial justice were inexorably intertwined. When he was assassinated (in 1968), he was fighting for Memphis sanitation workers.”
In the speech, King said: “I still believe that organized labor can be one of the most powerful instruments to do away with this evil that confronts our nation that we refer to as segregation and discrimination. It is certainly true that the forces that are anti-Negro are by and large anti-labor, and with the coming together of the powerful influence of labor and all people of good will in the struggle for freedom and human dignity, I can assure you that we have a powerful instrument.”
The recording is 17 minutes long, made up of excerpts from all the speakers at the event – including King speaking for one minute – interspersed with commentary from a union member. The audio is part of a package of materials, including 49 slides of color photographs and a pamphlet, compiled to offer union members who were not able to attend the conference a sense of what went on there, Calco said.
“It’s kind of an interesting package, because this is in a time before social media, before video recording of conferences, before Zoom options for conferences. It was essentially a way for the regular rank and file member to see both the slideshow and the audio was accompanying it.”
The one-minute audio excerpt of the speech shows the evolution of King’s rhetoric, Calco said.
“It was more subdued than you hear in some of his later speeches. It’s 1957, so well before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in ’63,” Calco said. “In this excerpt, Dr. King discusses the moral issue of civil rights to workers, asking whether they can ‘respect the dignity and worth of all human personality,’ a theme he touches on in later speeches. That line later evolves to ‘all labor has dignity,’ a powerful statement showing his sympathy with the economic struggle of workers.”
Together the transcript, audio clip and photos augment the Kheel Center’s already voluminous holdings that document King’s and Coretta Scott King’s work with unions, Calco said.
“The fact that there are more hidden gems relating to Dr. King in our archives is exciting,” Calco said. “We live for these moments of uncovering new artifacts that no one else has found before.”
This story originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.
