In addition to building a labor-civil rights coalition, the UFT leadership sought to strengthen bonds with a broad range of like-minded progressive movements, such as Cesar Chavez’s movement to organize migrant farm workers. Above: Cesar Chavez and Al Shanker at a benefit concert for the United Farmworkers in New York City in May 1976. 

UFT President Charles Cogen (left) along with UFT Assistant Treasurer Richard Parrish demonstrate against Woolworth's discriminatory policies in 1960.

On March 14, 1964, the UFT presented its prestigious Dewey Award to Martin Luther King Jr. In his acceptance speech, King proclaimed that “education for all Americans, white and Negro, has always been inadequate, the richest nation on Earth has never allocated enough of its abundant resources to build sufficient schools, to compensate adequately its teachers, and to surround them with the prestige their work justifies.” Here King listens while UFT Vice President George Altomare speaks. 

George Meaney, the powerful AFL-CIO president, opposed labor support for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom due to a general distaste for protest marches. In favor were UAW President Walter Reuther and UFT President Al Shanker. 

In response to the infamous incident known as Bloody Sunday, in which peaceful protesters outside Selma, Alabama, were violently beaten while crossing Edmund Pettus bridge, Al Shanker presented King with five station wagons donated by the teachers of New York City to help transport intimidated rural voters to registration centers. Shanker and other UFT officials later joined King in a protest march from Selma to Montgomery. Above: Shanker presents a check to King in a special reception hosted by the Central Labor Council in New York City, March 30, 1963. 

A Quaker and pacifist, Bayard Rustin introduced King to Gandhi’s principles of non-violent resistance and co-organized the March on Washington. Meeting through mutual friend Max Schachtman, Rustin and Shanker became life-long friends and allies. Above: with Shanker pushing through crowd at City Hall rally, September 1968. 

A. Philip Randolph was the founder and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and co-organizer of the March on Washington. With Shanker’s help he founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute to promote and strengthen the labor-Civil Rights coalition. He is here pictured marching in a picket line of teachers alongside Al Shanker during the Mass Resignation Rally, 1967. 

A protégé of Bayard Rustin and active in Civil Rights and socialist circles, future UFT President Sandy Feldman was hired by Al Shanker in 1966 as a grievance administrator. As a member of the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE) she participated in the Freedom Rides and was arrested for desegregating Howard Johnson restaurants along Maryland’s Route 40 (shown above). 

UFT President Al Shanker with Bayard Rustin (center) and A. Philip Randolph in May 1966.