King directed his words at both Black and white Americans, reminding them of all they had in common. He cited the historian C. Vann Woodward’s 1955 book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, saying segregation in the South had been employed not merely to express and maintain white supremacy but also as a “political stratagem” to hold down the wages of Black and white workers. The white elite used race to keep workers from uniting in an interracial populist movement.
