More from Alabama, where a delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders is  investigating the state’s recently passed anti-immigrant law. Follow the delegation here.

DREAMer activist Victor Palafox took a delegation of national labor leaders and community and faith activists on a tour of a trailer park in Pelham, Ala., about 15 minutes from Birmingham, to give them a taste of how Alabama’s H.B. 56, which is one of the most punishing anti-immigrant state laws in America, hurts typical working people.

More from Alabama, where a delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders is investigating the state’s recently passed anti-immigrant law. Follow the delegation here.

Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law instantly intimidated the nine Latino employees of Max’s Delicatessen, owned by Steve Dubrinsky, who says: 

They are good solid people, and I don’t like how they feel right now.

James Earl Jones is the recipient of the 2011 Actors’ Equity (AEA) Paul Robeson Award. The annual award honors performers who best exemplify the principles the legendary actor, singer, author and activist lived by.

Paul Robeson, once the premier African American artist of the 20th century, is well known as a scholar, athlete, actor and activist. Less well known is his long commitment to the union movement and his belief that the achievement of full equality for African Americans and other people of color is inextricably linked with the full equality of America’s working men and women.

This is an excerpt of a cross-post from the American Constitution Society Blog by Angelia Wade, associate general counsel for the AFL-CIO. The post coincided with the recent opening of the King National Memorial.

When he was assassinated in April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis lending his support to striking garbage sanitation workers who were seeking to have their union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), recognized so they could negotiate a contract that raised their standard of living.

Barbara Niccoli-Hiltz from the AFL-CIO field staff sends us this report.

After Maine Gov. Paul LePage and the state legislature repealed the state’s Election Day voter registration earlier this year, the Protect Maine Votes coalition, which includes the Maine AFL-CIO, went to work gathering signatures to put repeal of the measure before voters this fall. Last week, the coalition submitted 69,296 signatures to the Secretary of State’s office, well above the 52,277 needed for the referendum to qualify.

With reactionaries like Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker leading attacks on working people, Andrew Kersten, a University of Wisconsin-Green Bay history professor, says  famed 19th and 20th century labor lawyer Clarence Darrow would remind us that “labor rights are civil rights” and are “fundamental to the quest for equality, equity and freedom.”

J.W. Cleary, 55, says he has spent most of his adult life “with a union card in one hand and an NAACP card in the other.”

“Unions and the NAACP go hand-in-hand,” says the Paducah, Ky., United Steelworkers (USWA) member and longtime local NAACP president. “The NAACP fights for equality. In a union, everybody is equal.”

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, civil activist Shirley Sherrod and Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese will be honored tonight with the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil and Human Rights award by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCR).

At a jammed Electrical Workers (IBEW) hall in Trenton yesterday, New Jersey State AFL-CIO President Charles Wowkanech reminded the audience of union, community and civil rights activists that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

“understood the link between economic justice and social justice, and that the fight for labor rights and civil rights was the same struggle.”