A Great Teacher

History is a great teacher.  Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it.  By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production.  Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 - 1968), African American clergyman, civil rights activist, and Nobel laureate, speaking to the AFL–CIO (11 December 1961)