Labor on the Move: In Memoriam (2/20/08)

"Sing one more freedom song and you're under arrest," an Alabama sheriff in Marion, AL told a young James Orange in 1965. Five hundred students promptly followed Rev. Orange to jail, singing all the way.  The civil rights activist, who died Saturday at 65, brought "an incredible ability to inspire hope and courage in the face of fear to the union movement," said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, "leading working men and women to take on the boss, and to win a better life for themselves and their families time and time again." After helping to lead the struggle for racial equality as a key field organizer with the SCLC (and a top aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), Orange spent over thirty years working in the union movement, including as a field organizer in the AFL-CIO's Southern Region - leading pickets and rallies, marches and protests, and organizing social justice efforts from the ground up. Workers in poultry plants, sewing factories and shipyards all marched with him toward justice. A fixture on organizing efforts in the South, Rev. Orange played a role in nearly every major effort by Southern working men and women to form a union or stand up for justice over the past several decades. Click here to read more about Rev. Orange's amazing and inspiring life and work.