(BALTIMORE, MARYLAND) - Trade Unionists and Community Activists, 1,100 of them, are gathered here at the National AFL-CIO’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil Rights Conference not just to remember history, but, as many here say, to intervene in it.

“We are gathered to honor Martin Luther King’s sacrifices as we fight for our future,” said Alex Rias, who serves as the National AFL-CIO Director of Civil, Human, and Women’s Rights.

He framed the conference as a needed response to a historic moment.

“There are attacks on our Unions, Collective Bargaining Rights, Federal Workers, LGBTQ Workers and our history,” he told those in attendance.

Many here want to see the Labor Movement play a major role in all the key struggles of the day, including the fights for Civil Rights, Workers’ Rights, the push to end poverty, the movements to build alliances across lines of race and nationality, and the struggle for peace and an end to President Trump’s war mongering.

King cannot be honored only in word, they believe, but must be honored also in action.

As King said in Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence: “It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both Black and White - through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”

King’s struggle, as Rias said, can help point a united direction of struggle against the Anti-Labor, Anti-Worker violence of the fascistic, war-mongering Trump Administration.

To Continue Reading This Labor News Report, Go To: AFL-CIO leader: MLK Conference must launch fight for the future – People's World

Photo Courtesy Of The National AFL-CIO’s Facebook Page.