EDITOR'S NOTE: A national AFL-CIO website says "the AFL-CIO works to achieve one goal: A better life for working people." Today, we are starting "Our Union Heroes," a regular feature highlighting outstanding Kentucky trade unionists whose careers reflected that goal. It is hoped that one day the Kentucky State AFL-CIO can create a Kentucky Labor Hall of Fame to permanently honor our union heroes.
By BERRY CRAIG
Alliance for Retired Americans
Augusta Y. Thomas practiced what she preached as a civil rights and labor activist: "Do for those who cannot do for themselves."
In 1960, she traveled from Louisville, her hometown, to join the historic lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. Angry whites spit on her and shoved her off a stool. Police twice arrested her.
Six years later, Thomas joined the American Federation of Government Employees on the day she went to work as a nursing assistant at Louisville's Veterans Hospital. She spent 52 years in the union, capping her career as AFGE’s Washington-based national vice president for women and fair practices.
“Ms. Thomas is revered as AFGE’s most iconic civil, human and workers’ rights leader,” remembered Jeremy Lannan, her successor.
Thomas's union brothers and sisters said she embodied what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1962: "The coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined."
Thomas heard the gunshot that killed King on April 4, 1968.
I last saw her in February, 2018, eight months before she died at age 86. She was a featured speaker for the Working People’s Day of Action rally at the United Auto Workers Local 862 hall on Fern Valley Road in Louisville.
The crowd of union members and union supporters, including politicians, kept interrupting her with cheers and loud applause.
Her address was a short sketch of her life. She told about the time she and two of her teenage friends wanted to play a game that required a quartet. A third teen, "Little Martin," balked.
When he went to the basement to fuel the furnace with coal, Thomas locked the door behind him. After about 30 minutes, he relented and she let him out. “But let me tell you what,” Thomas said, grinning. “I got punished when I got home.”
Her “prisoner” was 17-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.
Thomas, 13, had gone to Atlanta to live with her aunt and uncle. Her uncle was a Methodist minister and colleague of the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., a Baptist. “The pastors would meet at 'Little Martin’s house,'” Thomas told me after her speech.
King and Thomas went to the same school before she returned to Louisville and graduated from Central High School. Thomas also went to Clark Atlanta University and the Homer G. Phillips School of Nursing in St. Louis.
Thomas was a 27-year-old veteran of Louisville sit-ins when she traveled to Jim Crow Greensboro. Fearing for her safety, her husband and her father begged her to stay home.
“If I don’t go and the next person doesn’t go and the next person doesn’t go, who’s going to be there to help?” Thomas explained when she earned a “Sit-In Participant” award from the Greensboro International Civil Rights Center and Museum.
She and "Little Martin" crossed paths again in Memphis in April, 1968. He was in the city supporting striking African American sanitation workers who had signed up with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
King did not live to see the strikers triumph. He was assassinated on April 4.
Thomas and five other women from different Louisville unions were in Memphis in solidarity with the strikers. They were in first floor rooms at the Lorraine Motel; King was on the second floor.
The women were in their rooms when James Earl Ray, a racist white man, murdered King with a rifle shot. King was standing on a second-floor balcony. (The motel is part of the National Civil Rights Museum.)
“We thought it was firecrackers, and we just ignored it,” she said, adding that when she heard King was dead, "all I could think about was that my friend was gone.”
The night before, Thomas and the other union women were in the crowd and heard King's immortal “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. "I had chills running down me,” Thomas also told me. “But I didn’t get to talk to him.”
Thomas was no fan of then-President Donald Trump and his Republican party. She urged the crowd: “We’ve got to get to the mountaintop. We have got to work together. We’ve got to get rid of ‘45’ and some of those folks up on that hill in Washington, D.C.”
Thomas warned, “The future of working people hangs in the balance right now... We must stand until we are all equals, no matter our race, no matter our gender, no matter our class.”
Thomas died on Oct. 10, 2018. A year later, her union and the Kentucky State AFL-CIO— she was a longtime member of the executive board — proclaimed Oct. 14 Augusta Y. Thomas Day, "a day dedicated to community service and reflection of the life of a leader that inspires us all to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves."
"Augusta Thomas was a tireless champion, a true warrior for workers’ rights, civil rights and human rights for all working people," said Bill Londrigan when he was state AFL-CIO president. "I still miss her."