Immigration Restrictions Helped Lead to Martin Luther King Success
Immigration Restrictions Helped Lead to Martin Luther King Success
By Roy Beck, January 15, 2021
On this day, the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., let’s remember the influence of immigration restriction on the effectiveness of the movement that he epitomizes.
At the 1963 March on Washington that included King’s iconic “I have a dream” speech, the lead organizer and head of the event was A. Philip Randolph, one of the greatest civil rights leaders of the 20th century. The president of the Sleeping Car Porters union had a long history of advocating for immigration restrictions as part of his five decades of advancing Black economic interests.
How the History of Waterloo, Iowa, Explains How Meatpacking Plants Became Hotbeds of COVID-19 ProPublica 12/21/2020
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
This spring, Waterloo, Iowa, became the site of one of the largest if not the largest COVID-19 workplace outbreaks in the United States. At the sprawling Tyson Foods pork plant on the eastern edge of town, at least 1,500 of the 2,800 workers have been infected with the virus, according to the county sheriff, who also heads the emergency management commission. Eight of those workers died, he said, and based on contact tracing, the cases tied to Tyson grow to 2,500 to 3,000. Waterloo was, in many ways, primed for an outbreak, and the reason lies in its history, which reflects the meatpacking industry’s dramatic transformation over the past half century. 1891