[Affirmative action is now a policy of the past. Something far
more powerful than affirmative action is still needed. The vision of
Randolph, Rustin and King offers a clue towards a solutions.]
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THE AMBITIONS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT WENT FAR BEYOND
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION  
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Jerome Karabel
June 29, 2023
TIME Magazine
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_ Affirmative action is now a policy of the past. Something far more
powerful than affirmative action is still needed. The vision of
Randolph, Rustin and King offers a clue towards a solutions. _

Leaders marching from the Washington Monument in Washington, DC,
August 23, 1963, Rowland Scherman for USIA US National Archives and
Records Administration

 

The Supreme Court’s elimination of affirmative action
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undeniably a setback for racial justice—one that will lead to a
substantial decline in Black and perhaps Hispanic enrollments in
universities and professional schools. It will lead as well to a
narrowing of the pipeline that supplies much of the nation’s
leadership. But it is also an opportunity—a moment to reconsider far
more ambitious and effective strategies for achieving racial justice.

Affirmative action was never the true goal of the civil rights
movement; the ultimate prize was full racial equality. At best a
consolation prize, affirmative action was a modest concession granted
by the Establishment in a time of turbulent racial upheaval. To be
sure, the vast majority of civil rights leaders favored affirmative
action: as Martin Luther King Jr
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“A society that has done something special _against _the Negro for
hundreds of years must now do something special _for _him.” But
the demands of the civil rights movement went far beyond affirmative
action—a policy that was effective in altering the racial
composition of the elite, but left the conditions of most
African-Americans unchanged.

At the height of the civil rights movement, five organizations
dominated the struggle for racial justice: Martin Luther King’s
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the NAACP, the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Urban League, and the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Following the great legal
victories of the movement—the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights of 1965—the leaders of the Big Five came
together to support an ambitious 1966 program
[[link removed]], analogous to a domestic
Marshall Plan, named _A_ “_Freedom Budget” for All
Americans. _Coauthored by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, and
supported by the presidents of key labor unions including the United
Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers of America, prominent
Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders, and eminent intellectuals
such as John Kenneth Galbraith, David Riesman, and Daniel Bell, it
brought together a broad coalition in support of a plan calling for
the total elimination of poverty by 1975.

But the _Freedom Budget_ was far more than a plan to help the poor.
Alongside its assault on poverty, it proposed a multi-pronged program,
including full employment, a massive public housing initiative,
expanded investment in education job training, a nationwide and
universal system of health insurance, and a guaranteed minimum income
for all Americans. Well aware that a program of this magnitude would
disproportionately help black Americans who were concentrated in the
lower runs of America’s social structure, the authors of
the _Freedom Budget_
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majority of America’s poor and unemployed were white. In his
introduction to a summary version of the _Freedom Budget,_ A. Philip
Randolph, the great elder statesman of the civil rights movement who
had inspired the 1963 March on Washington, wrote of “the
tragedy…that the workings of our economy so often pitted the white
poor and the black poor against each other at the bottom of
society.” Only a coalition bringing together all races, argued
Randolph and Martin Luther King, who wrote the Foreword
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Freedom Budget for All Americans_, could generate the political
pressure necessary to make the Freedom Budget a reality.

The _Freedom Budget_ marked the next stage of the civil rights
movement; having won civil and political rights, the movement was now
demanding social and economic rights. Had it been adopted,
the _Freedom Budge_t would have moved the United States several steps
towards a Scandinavian-type social welfare state; in so doing, it
would have massively improved the life conditions of not only black
Americans, but poor and working-class Americans of all races. But,
the _Freedom Budget_ was expensive; costing 185 billion dollars over
ten years (the equivalent of over 1.7 trillion dollars today), it fell
victim to both the escalating cost of the war in Vietnam, where nearly
400,000 American troops were stationed by the end of 1966, and a
rising white backlash.

From left, Morris B. Abram, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip
Randolph, John Lewis and William T. Coleman take part the White House
Conference on Civil Rights with a call for $100 billion "Freedom
Budget". Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The _Freedom Budge_t was by no means the only African-American voice
calling for fundamental change. In the same month that the _Freedom
Budget _was published, the newly formed Black Panther Party issued
its “Ten-Point Program.”
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more radical than the Big Five civil rights organizations, the
Panthers demanded reparations in the form of currency reflecting the
“overdue debt of forty acres and a mule,” an “immediate end to
police brutality and the murder of black people,” that “all black
men…be exempt from military service,” “freedom for all black men
held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails,” and
“land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.”
Taken together, the demands of the Panther Party platform constituted
a call for an end to capitalism and the initiation of a vaguely
defined revolution.

In the wake of the violent racial rebellion in Newark, Detroit and
other cities in the summer of 1967, even Establishment voices issued
calls for drastic change. On July 28, 1967, while Detroit was still in
flames, President Johnson formed the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorder (later widely known as the Kerner Commission) to
understand the cause of the riots that had shaken American cities and
to suggest policies that would prevent such riots from occurring in
the future. But The Kerner Report
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not what President Johnson had expected. Reflecting the sense of
crisis then gripping the nation, the report declared, in a passage
that has echoed through time, that “what White Americans have never
fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white
society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created
it, white institutions maintained it, and white society condones
it.”

For an Establishment panel, the Kerner Commission’s recommendations
were surprisingly bold: the creation of two million jobs, the
establishment of “uniform national standards of assistance at least
as high as the single ‘poverty level’ of income,” bringing
“six million new and existing units of decent housing within the
reach of low and moderate income families within the next five
years,” and a transformation in the organization and functioning of
policing. Like the Freedom Budget, the cost of the programs proposed
by the Kerner Commission would run into the tens of billions of
dollars. And like the Freedom Budget, after an initial wave of
enthusiasm (selling three quarters of a million copies in the first
two weeks alone), the escalating cost of the Vietnam War and a rising
racial backlash would mean that the Commission’s ambitious
proposals
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never be implemented.

Martin Luther King Jr praised
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Kerner Commission Report when it was released on March 1, 1968,
calling it “a physician’s warning of approaching death, with a
prescription for life.” At the time the Kerner Report was published,
however, King was deeply absorbed in planning his Poor People’s
Campaign
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effort to bring poor people of all races together in an effort at mass
mobilization, using civil disobedience if necessary. The Poor
People’s Campaign, as King envisioned it, would culminate in a giant
and sustained demonstration in Washington DC, demanding that the
nation’s politicians finally act to end the scandal of poverty in
the world’s richest nation. Over the past several years, King had
become increasingly militant, telling journalist David Halberstam that
“after laboring with the idea of reforming the existing institutions
of the society, a little change here, a little change there,” he had
come to believe that what was needed was a “reconstruction of the
entire society.” At a staff retreat of the SCLC, King went even
further, privately telling those present that it was time to disrupt
business as usual in “earthquake proportions,” that “something
is wrong…with capitalism” and that “America must move towards a
democratic socialism.” But on April 7, 1968, King’s plans for the
Poor People’s Campaign—and any elaboration of his increasingly
radical worldview—came to a tragic end with his assassination in
Memphis.

More than half a century later, what is striking about revisiting the
aspirations of the 1960s civil rights movement is how peripheral
affirmative action was to its deepest aspirations. In place for two
generations, affirmative action has undeniably produced considerable
achievements: the diversification of the nation’s leading colleges
and universities, the massive expansion of the black middle class, and
the creation of a leadership stratum more representative of the
American people. One should not, however, exaggerate the magnitude of
the changes it produced. As Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William
Domhoff, who have written several influential books on diversity in
the American elite, observe, minorities selected into the elite
“share the prevailing perspectives and values of those already in
power.” Their ethos “is not ‘multicultural’ in any full sense
of the concept, but only in terms of ethnic or racial origins.”

Yet however one judges the ultimate impact of affirmative action, it
is now a policy of the past. For those who remain committed to the
cause of racial equality, the ideas of the mainstream of the civil
rights movement of the 1960s—among them, a concerted assault on
poverty, the adoption of a nationwide guaranteed income, universal
healthcare, the creation of the European-style welfare state, and the
formation of the multiracial coalition of poor and working class
people as the vehicle most likely to lead to its adoption—remain
relevant. In a society in which the wealth gap
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white and black households remains yawning— $188,2000 for whites
compared to $24,100 for blacks–something far more powerful than
affirmative action is still needed. In searching for solutions, we
would do well to return to the vision of such giants of the civil
rights movement as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin
Luther King, Jr.

JEROME KARABEL is a Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University
of California, Berkeley, and is currently writing a book, _Outlier
Nation: The Epochal History of How The United States Became a Country
Like No Other. _He is the author of the award-winning book, _The
Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard,
Yale, and Princeton _and has previously written for _The New York
Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Nation,
Le Monde Diplomatique, _and other publications_._

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* affirmative action
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* Supreme Court Decision
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* civil rights movement
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* A. Philip Randolph
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* Bayard Rustin
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* Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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