Kentuckian Augusta Y. Thomas broke barriers
Republished from Kentucky Lantern
The late Augusta Yvonne Thomas of Louisville embodied the civil rights, labor and women’s rights movements.
“Augusta organized thousands of women and minorities into the union movement,’’ said her longtime friend Bill Londrigan, past president of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO.
She also was one of the oldest elected union officials in the country. She served as the American Federation of Government Employees’ national vice president for women and fair practices, a post she held from 2009-2018 until retiring at age 85.
Born in Louisville in 1932, she became a civil rights activist in 1960, taking part in historic lunch counter sit-in protests against segregation in Greensboro, N.C.
Six years later, Thomas was hired as a nurse’s assistant at the Louisville Veterans Administration hospital. She signed an AFGE union card on Nov. 12, 1966, her first day on the job, and ultimately became president of Local 1133.
Thomas was in Memphis in early April of 1968, joining the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in solidarity with striking Black union sanitation workers. She heard his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech and the fatal rifle shot fired by his assassin.
Thomas stayed an activist almost until her death on Oct. 10, 2018, at age 86.
She grew up in Louisville when Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy were the law and the social order in the old Confederate states and in border states like Kentucky. Violence or the threat of violence underpinned the system.
At age 13, Thomas lived with her aunt and uncle in Atlanta. He was a Methodist pastor and a member of a ministerial association that included the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., a Baptist.
Thomas enjoyed telling about the time the ministers gathered at the King house. She and two other teens present needed a fourth to play a game. “Little Martin” refused.
When he went to the basement to fuel the coal furnace, Thomas locked the door. She kept him prisoner for about 30 minutes until he relented.
After attending the same school as King, Thomas returned to Louisville and graduated from Central High School. She also took classes at Clark Atlanta University and the Homer G. Phillips School of Nursing in St. Louis.
When Thomas announced she was heading to Greensboro, her husband and her father, fearing for her safety, begged her not to go.
“If I didn’t go, and the next person doesn’t go, and the next person doesn’t go, who’s going to be there and help?” Thomas later recalled when she was honored with a “Sit-in Participant” award from the Greensboro International Civil Rights Center and Museum.
Angry whites spat on Thomas and knocked her off a stool. White cops arrested her twice. Undaunted, she took part in sit-ins in Louisville in 1961.
In Memphis, Thomas and five other Louisville union women were in the crowd at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ on the night of April 3, 1968, when King delivered his immortal speech. “I had chills running down me,” she told me. “But I didn’t get to talk to him.”
Thomas and her union sisters were in their ground floor rooms in the Lorraine Motel on April 4 when James Earl Ray, a racist white man, murdered King with a rifle shot. King was standing outside 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,” Thomas also told me, adding that when she heard King was dead, “all I could think about was that my old friend was gone.”
Though her health was beginning to fail, Thomas spoke at a Working People’s Day of Action rally on Feb. 24, 2018, at the United Auto Workers Local 862 hall on Fern Valley Road in Louisville.
While she sketched her 58 years as a union and human rights activist, she also touched on politics of the day.
“The future of working people hangs in the balance right now,” she warned. “We must stand until we are all equals, no matter our race, no matter our gender, no matter our class.”
Thomas panned President Donald Trump and the GOP, challenging 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.”
Her death didn’t stop the honors that came her way in life. The corner of Shasta Trail and Ilex Avenue in Louisville was named for her.
Each year on Oct. 14, the state AFL-CIO and AFGE celebrate Augusta Y. Thomas Day.
Annually, the AFGE’s Augusta Y. Thomas Civil Rights Award goes “to four dedicated trade unionists who exemplify what it means to be a true champion for civil, human, women, and workers’ rights.”
Thomas was a long-time member of the state AFL-CIO Executive Board where she worked closely with Londrigan.
“I have always said that workers’ rights and civil rights are one and the same,” he added. “You cannot have workers’ rights without civil rights and vice versa. Dr. King, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Walter Reuther all knew that to be a fact, and out of that recognition came the historic March On Washington. Among those who dedicated their lives to the interconnectedness of workers’ rights and civil rights was Augusta Y. Thomas.”
I don’t know if Thomas ever crossed paths with Randolph. But he could have been talking about her when he said “the essence of trade unionism is social uplift.”
She, too, was fired by an unshakable faith in organized labor as the uplifter of the whole working class, not just those of us who pack union cards.
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