Listen: What Happened to MLK’s Vision? Plus - Rail Safety Off the Rails!

Demonstrators in NJ commemorate the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster. Photo courtesy of Paula Rogovin.

By Bob Hennelly

On the last Monday of Black History Month, it’s important for the labor movement to reflect on the sad reality that in the half a century since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. America's vast racial wealth divide has endured and, in some regards, gotten worse. While thanks to the passage of laws like the Fair Housing Act of 1968, we saw some progress between 1960 to 1980, between 1980 to 2020, we started going backward with the racial wealth gap actually increasing each year. We talk with Kevin Pierce and Rachel Dawn Davis with the New Jersey Poor People’s Campaign about how they are working to bring Dr. King’s vision of social AND economic justice forward into the 21st century.

In the second half of the show we focus on how labor and community-based environmental groups can come together to hold America’s runaway railroad lobby accountable for the kind of ecological devastation we saw in East Palestine, Ohio, after a Norfolk Southern train derailed resulting in a massive fire and release of toxic chemicals including vinyl chloride earlier this month.

We speak with Paul Lindsey, a longtime Union Pacific locomotive engineer, who is a member of the of Brotherhood Locomotive Engineers & Trainmen and on the media committee of the United Railroad Workers. We will also get the regional perspective of longtime Teaneck peace and justice activist Paula Rogovin with the Coalition to Ban Unsafe Oil Trains which has been working for several years to get Trenton to enact a commonsense rail safety bill.