In March 2020, the UCLA Labor Center organized a labor delegation to travel with Rev. James Lawson Jr. to Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, the home of the civil rights movement. Montgomery was the site of the bus boycott in 1955 that catapulted Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to international prominence. Selma was the site of Bloody Sunday, where, in 1965, Congressman John Lewis and other civil rights leaders were brutally attacked by state and local law enforcement officers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge; Lewis suffered a skull fracture and was almost killed.
This journey was transformational for many of the participants, including Ron Herrera, president of the 800,000-member Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.