(Mike Brown/The Commercial Appeal via AP) Christopher Smith, right, leads chants during a protest for higher wages for fast food workers outside a McDonald's in Memphis, Tenn., Thursday, April 14, 2016. O n the April 4, 1968, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to support the city’s striking sanitation workers, virtually all of them African American. The workers were embroiled in a heated labor dispute with the city government over low wages, dangerous working conditions, and its unyielding opposition to recognizing their union. Forty-nine years later, much has changed, yet much more has stayed the same. Despite landmark advancements in civil rights, black Americans still face staggering levels of systemic social and economic inequities and rampant state-sanctioned violence and discrimination. Black men are three times more likely to be killed by police than white men, and are incarcerated at...

(AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty) Workers watch a christening ceremony at Bath Iron Works from the bow of the future USS Michael Monsoor in Bath, Maine. R epublicans may not be adept at health-care legislation, but they are proving themselves immensely skilled at dismantling labor protections. Using the Congressional Review Act, an obscure legislative tactic that allows Congress to repeal recently enacted regulations with a simple majority and could forbid future administrations from promulgating similar rules, Republicans are rapidly unraveling a series of President Obama’s pro-worker rules that enraged powerful business associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. President Donald Trump is more than willing to facilitate the destruction of his predecessor’s legacy of worker protections. On Monday, behind closed doors and without his typical fanfare, Trump signed Congress’s repeal of Obama’s Fair Pay, Safe Workplaces executive order that would have mandated that companies with...