Celebrating May Day in Louisville, Kentucky is a tricky proposition. Every year the first week of May is dedicated to a spectacle that attracts hundreds of millionaires and billionaires — the Kentucky Derby. Arguably, the Derby has always been a sport of, by, and for the ruling class. Still, until a few years ago, the areas around Churchill Downs were home to proletarian cookouts and parties that balanced out the tailored suits, fancy drinks, and thousand-dollar wagers of the upper crust. Today locals are for the most part shut out of the party, our neighborhood streets get cleared and closed, and the entire rhythm of the city is disrupted to accommodate Saudi oil barons.
In spite of this, the Louisville Democratic Socialists of America made a plan to celebrate May Day this year. Our chapter’s labor committee reached out to potential partners and got an unexpected and extremely enthusiastic response from the state federation of labor, the Kentucky AFL-CIO. In retrospect, this enthusiasm is the result of years of work on the part of our chapter to show up consistently for the labor movement in Louisville. Our presence on picket lines and doing the long, difficult work of rebuilding the labor movement demonstrated to our allies at the Kentucky AFL-CIO that we aren’t just fair-weather friends. Once we saw what doors this partnership opened, the scale and vision of our celebration grew.
Our May Day subcommittee invited the AFL-CIO and United Auto Workers Local 862, which represents workers at the Ford plant in Louisville, to be co-equal partners in planning the celebration. We jointly settled on the idea of a May Day festival and organizing fair, where people who wanted to organize could seek out a union. Teamsters Local 89, for example, had a table to recruit folks to Amazon.
Our AFL-CIO allies suggested a requirement that only unions and DSA be permitted to table. This requirement allowed us to stay laser-focused on a message of class struggle and the benefits of organized labor. Almost immediately we started receiving requests from NGOs, political campaigns, and other organizations seeking to have a presence. We succeeded at planting our flag and established the precedent that this is a day to celebrate workers, preventing the dilution of our message by those who opportunistically use the cause of labor to advance their own agenda. In all, a dozen unions tabled at the event and rank-and-file members and organizers from many others attended in a personal capacity.
We estimate that 600 people attended the festival at Jefferson Square Park between 11 am and 3 pm on May 1st. People sang along to live music, ate free food prepared by our friends in the UAW, listened to speeches from labor leaders and rank-and-file militants, and enjoyed kids’ activities like face painting and temporary tattoos.
We also hosted a People’s Derby puppet show as part of the festivities. Horses representing “People” and “Profit” raced around a track. People was constantly beset by Profit’s cheating until a swarm of worker-bees distracted Profit long enough for the people’s horse to cross the finish line and receive a garland of roses.
Seeding a Tradition
Our May Day festival was a resounding success. In the end, all partners came away feeling satisfied and energized for more joint actions. However, this budding partnership is still fragile. We intend to cultivate this relationship with the diligence and patience of a gardener. Our goal has always been to unite the labor and socialist movements. In Louisville DSA we aren’t anywhere near accomplishing such a thing, but on May Day we took an important step towards this goal. The solidarity between our organization and the unions that showed up to celebrate International Workers’ Day is unlike anything Kentucky has ever seen.
The avenues are open for the ongoing spadework that will make the legacy of May Day 2026 last. We have to keep encouraging new organizing in strategic workplaces and developing worker-leaders who can take the fighting spirit of May Day onto the shop floor every day. Our festival went out of its way to platform exactly this kind of individual. Amazon workers at a nearby facility have demanded union recognition — the first in the state — and a rank-and-file member addressed the crowd to uplift our fight against one of the largest private employers in the country. I want every subsequent May Day to be filled with a growing number of fighters like him.
