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.”

In a Point of View column for the AFL-CIO, Kersten, who has written a biography of Darrow, says the lawyer would have scoffed at and shamed Walker for saying “collective bargaining was a an expensive entitlement.” Says Kersten:

In terms of the law, the idea that workers have rights to organize and collectively bargain is as old as the nation itself.
Such a statement would be fighting words in most of the United States where workers are battling to keep their jobs, to maintain their wages and benefits and to remain connected to politics. Darrow’s message would be particularly poignant in Wisconsin, where we can already see what life is like without the ability to exercise labor rights.

Read the full column, “Memo: Clarence Darrow to Gov. Walker: Labor Rights ARE Civil Rights,” here.

Kersten says Darrow would have pointed out how in the 19th and early 20th centuries, workers demanded progress and achieved advances through political fights and legal battles. To Darrow, without those rights, civilization itself was at great risk.

Darrow would remind us there has been only one way for working people to secure labor rights: organize and agitate to defend them. Kersten quotes  Darrow who once said, “The best proof of the usefulness of the union is that the employers don’t want it.”

Darrow is probably best known for his defense in 1925 of John Scopes, a Tennessee teacher accused of teaching evolution—a role recreated by actor Spencer Tracy in the movie “Inherit the Wind.”