Reverend, Pastor, Minister, Sister, Brother in Christ,

I write to you not only as a union president, but as a man raised in this city, taught by this city's churches, and shaped by this city's gospel. Memphis is the place where the pulpit and the picket line have always met — and where the next generation will lose both if we do not act together.

Memphis Already Wrote This Sermon Once

In February of 1968, when 1,300 Black sanitation workers walked off the job after two of their brothers — Echol Cole and Robert Walker — were crushed to death inside a garbage compactor, the men did not march alone. The Memphis pastors marched with them.

• Rev. James Lawson, pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church, was the one who picked up the phone and asked Dr. King to come to Memphis.
• Clayborn Temple AME Church on Hernando Street became the staging ground — the rallies were held there, the strategy meetings happened there, and the famous "I AM A MAN" placards were stored, distributed, and carried out from inside that sanctuary.
• Mason Temple — the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ — was where Dr. King delivered his final sermon, "I've Been to the Mountaintop," on the night of April 3, 1968. He died the next day in support of those workers.

The 1968 sanitation strike was not won by the union alone. It was not won by the church alone. It was won by the union and the church together, and history has not yet produced another coalition that powerful in the American South.

The Same Coalition Is Needed Again

Our young people do not know any of this. They do not know that the sanctuary doubled as a strike headquarters. They do not know that Sunday school classrooms once doubled as freedom schools. They do not know that the Black church gave the labor movement its songs, its discipline, and its theology of dignity — and that the labor movement returned the favor by feeding, clothing, and protecting the church's families through every economic downturn since.

If we do not teach them, no one will.

We have built the curriculum. We need the Memphis church to help us deliver it.

What We've Built

Over the past two years, we've assembled a 16-module teacher-ready curriculum covering three Black labor giants whose lives are inseparable from the Black church:

• A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) — son of an AME minister, raised in the AME Zion church in Florida, built the first major Black labor union in America
• Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) — a lifelong Quaker pacifist whose Gandhian nonviolence came directly from his faith and shaped the entire civil rights movement
• William "Bill" Lucy (1933–2024) — Memphis-born organizer who made the "I AM A MAN" placards inside Clayborn Temple and went on to found the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists in 1972

Every module is a downloadable PDF lesson plan with primary sources, discussion questions, and activities. The full platform — including a Youth Library, Bible-friendly historical narratives, and a kid-friendly progress tracker — is free and lives at laboreducation.org.

Four Ways Your Church Can Plug In

Who We Need You to Invite

You and your church already know the people we need. We're looking for:

• Sunday school teachers and youth ministers willing to teach a few sessions a year
• Retired educators in your congregation who taught for thirty years and still have lesson plans in them
• Deacons, elders, and trustees who lived through the 1968 strike or its aftermath and can tell the story firsthand
• Lay leaders who want to bridge the church and the labor movement in their own neighborhood

A Personal Word

I was raised to believe that a faith that does not care for the worker is not the faith of the Galilean carpenter. The book of James 5:4 says it plainly: "Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out…" The Black church and the labor movement have always preached the same sermon from different pulpits. We are simply asking you to preach it once more, to a generation that has not yet heard it.

To Respond

Please respond by ___________________ so we can have our first cohort of church-based volunteer teachers placed before the next program year.

Yours in faith and in solidarity,