Note: After almost seven years of compelling work, Word and World has taken a “sabbatical” due to lack of financial and human resources. Stakeholders will be gathering in Greensboro in June, 2009 to assess and discern what the future of the project might be. We appreciate your prayers.

Word and World Memphis School Focuses on Living Wage Struggles Past and Present

By Ched Myers

 After two years of planning, the fifth week-long Word and World School convened in Memphis, TN in the last week of July.  The focus of the School was “Faith and Labor,” and the central storyline was that of the ongoing struggle for worker justice and a living wage.  The school was anchored in the history of the Sanitation Workers strike of 1968, during which Martin Luther King Jr. was killed (left in his last march, March 1968). 

Site visits around Memphis included the National Civil Rights Museum at the old Lorrain Motel; the New Chicago neighborhood of north Memphis, which still suffers from the closing of a Firestone Fire plant years ago; and the local American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees office where the memory of the Sanitation Workers strike is kept alive.  The week culminated with an action at the Quebecor plant (one of several non-unionized plants operated by the second largest printing company in the world) just across the state line in Mississippi, where low-income workers (predominately African American) have been harassed for trying to organize a union to obtain better pay and safer working conditions. 

In various panels we learned about current living wage campaigns in Memphis and elsewhere; examined the ongoing injustices stemming from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans; and heard from elderly veterans of the fateful 1968 strike: Rev. Frank McRae, Taylor Rogers, Ida Leachman and Rev. Ezekiel Bell (pictured l to r; photo Commercial Appeal).  Classes included a history of the labor movement in song and pictures; Jesus, Work and Wealth; Sabbath Economics; A Womanist Look at Labor; Doing Good in the Jewish Tradition; The Church as Beloved Community; Labor and Immigration; Engaging Seminaries in Worker Justice; Prison Labor; The Farm Worker Movement; Community Unionism; White People as Allies of People of Color; and Establishing Worker Centers.

This year the School had two additional parts which were co-sponsored by the Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change: a midweek, day-long academic symposium on labor and globalization; and a weekend conference focusing on building ties between Black churches and the trade union movement.  Overall some 200 persons attended these overlapping events during the week, including more than 40 young adults.  Two thirds of the participants were from the Southeast, 60% were persons of color, and a dozen trade unions were represented from both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win labor federations.  Although we didn’t get as much participation from local and regional pastors as we had hoped, all who attended were deeply impacted by the spirit of the “learning village” Word and World creates. 

Musicians Ange Smith and Charlie King and poets Jim Perkinson and Tiffany Gray highlighted the many cultural contributions, and we heard powerful preaching from Alexia Salvatierra (left) and J. Herbert Lester (right) as well as Nelson Johnson and John Mendez from North Carolina.  In the closing worship service an “altar call to commitment” inaugurated a Southern Faith, Community and Labor Alliance (below Mendez addresses a SFCLA organizing meeting in Greensboro, Jan 06). We hope this network will help promote and deepen collaboration between people of faith and struggles for economic and labor justice throughout the Southeast and beyond. 

Once again Word and World managed to put on an excellent School, despite our shoestring budget and thin infrastructure.  A young African American seminarian said to us toward the end of the school, “I feel like I’ve had the kind of conversion experience that Malcolm X had in jail.  I’ll never be the same.” 

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