[Sixty years ago today, hundreds of thousands gathered at the
Washington Mall, where they heard Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have
a Dream” speech. Since then, we’ve beaten a retreat from the
march’s vision of racial and economic justice. ]
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THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON ADVANCED A RADICAL VISION FOR SOCIETY THAT
REMAINS UNFULFILLED  
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Paul Prescod
August 28, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Sixty years ago today, hundreds of thousands gathered at the
Washington Mall, where they heard Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have
a Dream” speech. Since then, we’ve beaten a retreat from the
march’s vision of racial and economic justice. _

Demonstrators at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August
28, 1963. , (Rowland Scherman / National Archives at College Park via
Wikimedia Commons)

 

By noon on August 28, 1963, the Washington Mall was a sea of people,
dabbing sweat from their brows and bobbing picket signs in the air.
The official police report counted 250,000, but those who were there
said it had to be at least 400,000.

Sign reading “We Demand Voting Rights Now!” and “We March for
Integrated Schools Now!” reflected the demands of a civil rights
movement that had grown in confidence and had reached a truly
explosive character. There was also a strong economic component,
reflected in slogans like “Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals
Freedom,” “We Demand an FEPC Law Now!,” and “We Demand Decent
Housing Now!” Many in the crowd were there representing their labor
unions, like the United Auto Workers (UAW) and Industrial Union of
Electrical Workers.

While it was hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who made the
event so significant, many celebrities were featured in the day’s
programming or could be spotted in the crowds. Musicians Mahalia
Jackson, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan serenaded the audience; stars
like Harry Belafonte
[[link removed]] and
Josephine Baker gave speeches; and Jackie Robinson
[[link removed]],
Sammy Davis Jr, Paul Newman, and Marlon Brando could be seen
hobnobbing.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place sixty years
ago today. It is justifiably recognized as one of the most successful
protest events in US history, a cultural touchstone that continues to
penetrate our consciousness. As the years pass on, it has even been
portrayed as a model of acceptable mainstream dissent. No US
president, Democrat or Republican, would dare cast the March on
Washington in a negative light or fail to praise Martin Luther King
Jr’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech.

The march is also presented as an end point, a kind of “mission
accomplished” for the civil rights movement. Black people held a big
march, bills were passed, equality reigned supreme, and America held
true to its ideals. While the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
certainly should be praised and credited with playing a role in
challenging inequality, these narratives elide its fundamental goals
and the truly radical potential to build a different America that it
represented.

The march served as a pivot point taking the civil rights movement
beyond the stage of racial equality before the law. It set forth an
agenda that challenged capitalism at its roots and sought to remake
the country along the lines of democratic socialism. The sixty years
since the march have seen a retreat from this vision, which places
racial inequality in the context of the broader political economy. The
result has been a precipitous decline in the living conditions for the
majority of black working people, and an accelerated class divide
between them and their middle- and upper-class counterparts.

The radical demands of the March on Washington have still not been
fulfilled. Recovering the true legacy of the march and its aftermath
can help us establish the root causes of racial inequality today and
what to do about it.

Freedom, But How to Pay For It?

The idea for a massive demonstration in the nation’s capital had
lived in the minds of civil rights activists ever since A. Philip
Randolph’s audacious March on Washington Movement
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the early 1940s. Threatening to march tens of thousands of black
people at the White House to end discrimination in defense-industry
employment, the movement forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to
sign Executive Order 8802, establishing the Fair Employment Practice
Committee. Such a direct, militant mobilization of working-class
blacks was rare and struck fear in the heart of the ruling class.

Randolph called off the march after extracting the concession from
Roosevelt. This move left some younger militant activists
disappointed, however. Chief among them was Bayard Rustin, who at the
time was a young pacifist who got swept up in Randolph’s initiative.
Eventually the two would mend fences and become extremely close
political associates.

Over twenty years later, at Randolph’s Harlem office in December
1962, the two revived their grand vision for a march. After getting
Randolph’s blessing, Rustin began working with old assistants Tom
Kahn and Norman Hill to craft the overall framing for the event. At
first, Rustin conceived of a march that put economic demands front and
center, with only little reference to civil rights.

In a first draft of the program, Rustin declared, “The one hundred
years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation have
witnessed no fundamental government action to terminate the economic
subordination of the American Negro.” The most glaring issue in his
mind was not race relations per se but “the unresolved crisis of the
national economy.” He also envisioned it as a two-day event; one day
for intense congressional lobbying and one day for a mass rally.

Constructing the coalition that would carry out the event was
slow-going and difficult work. Rustin and Randolph wanted a united
front of civil rights organizations, and by the end of March 1963 the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE) endorsed the march. But Martin Luther King Jr
and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were lukewarm
about the idea, not coming on board until late May. The National Urban
League initially declined to support for fear of jeopardizing
relationships with members of Congress, and the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) still had not endorsed
by the time the march was officially announced.

As great an organizer as Rustin was, it was events in the broader
movement that generated the needed momentum and interest. Throughout
the spring of 1963 the SCLC had been waging an assault on segregated
businesses in Birmingham, Alabama with marches and civil disobedience.
At first, the infamous Birmingham police chief Theophilus “Bull”
Connor held his troops in check and largely refrained from excessive
brutality. Activists struggled to garner sufficient interest from the
media and federal government.

However, the SCLC’s fateful decision in early May to let children
participate in the struggle completely changed the dynamic. Connor and
the Birmingham Police Department let loose and plastered television
screens with the unforgettable images of German shepherds biting
children and water hoses drowning peaceful protesters. Over 2,500
demonstrators were arrested and detained within just one week. All of
a sudden, the John F. Kennedy administration had a national crisis on
its hands.

In June, over one thousand leaders were convened in Washington, DC,
and they called on Congress for civil rights legislation. Now, a big
march in August had momentum and was tied to real political stakes.
Rustin and other planners began to incorporate the “freedom” and
civil rights elements more into the march’s program. King and the
SCLC bought in and became more excited. Rustin later acknowledged,
“The events in Birmingham were more important for organizing [the
March on Washington] than . . . me or anything else.”

Hitherto skeptical organizations such as the NAACP and National Urban
League jumped on the bandwagon. The NAACP in particular had a robust
organizational infrastructure and worked hard to turn its members out.
Though President Kennedy tried to put a stop to the march for fear of
violence, there was no derailing the train now.

Although the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial
Organizations (AFL-CIO) did not formally endorse the event, labor
unions were critical for its success. Black trade unionists who cut
their teeth in the early days of the CIO, like Cleveland Robinson from
the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and Addie Wyatt from
the United Packinghouse Workers of America
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organized large delegations from their unions to attend. The
International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the UAW coughed
up $20,000 for the event’s sound system. Other supporting unions
included the United Steelworkers and the United Electrical, Radio and
Machine Workers of America.

The march itself, in both its participants and program, was a living
embodiment of the broad social democratic coalition that civil rights
leaders like Randolph and Rustin believed would be necessary for the
future. The demands blended the needs of the ascendant civil rights
movement with long-standing goals of the labor movement.

The march itself, in both its participants and program, was a living
embodiment of the broad social democratic coalition that civil rights
leaders like Randolph and Rustin believed would be necessary for the
future.

The civil rights demands were comprehensive, asserting the right of
all Americans to housing, education, voting, and public accommodation
on a nonsegregated and nondiscriminatory basis.

Some of the economic demands were quite radical in their implications.
The call for a “A massive federal program to train and place all
unemployed workers — Negro and white — on meaningful and dignified
jobs at decent wages” directly challenged the bipartisan commonsense
assumption that full employment would inevitably lead to unacceptable
inflation. The march also demanded national minimum-wage legislation,
a permanent Fair Employment Practices Act, and a broadening of the
Fair Labor Standards Act to include previously excluded sectors.

As the March on Washington became lionized in mainstream narratives of
US history, it has become fashionable among some on the Left to
dismiss the event as too moderate. However, the programmatic demands
in fact represented a complete redistribution of wealth and political
power that the country had never seen before.

Others have also charged that the march achieved no meaningful
political victories. Kwame Ture, in his autobiography _Ready for
Revolution
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asserted, “In cold political terms, the march changed nothing.”
The passage of two major pieces of legislation soon after the march,
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, make
this view hard to maintain. While of course this legislation was the
product of a mass movement that was active over a long period of time,
it is clear that the March on Washington was a dramatic demonstration
of a majority coalition in support of these aims that the ruling class
could no longer ignore.

However, movement leaders did not disagree that civil rights
legislation still left the major issues affecting black people,
especially in northern cities, virtually untouched. In one sense, the
March on Washington could be seen as a transition point toward
addressing broader economic issues after formal civil rights were
granted.

Both Randolph and Rustin were quick to recognize that the movement had
entered a new era full of complexities and potential pitfalls. In
January 1965, the Negro American Labor Council held a “State of the
Race Summit” to chart a new course forward for civil rights
activists. Here, Randolph gave his “Crisis of Victory” speech that
outlined some of the problems ahead.

He observed a “psychological and social gap” between the smaller
stratum of black people who would benefit from the education and
employment opportunities unleashed by the Civil Rights Act and the
“black masses.” Accordingly, the task now was to build a
“national consensus” around the issues of affordable housing, full
employment, quality education, and economic security. This can only be
done through a broad multiracial coalition, he explained: “Negroes
must move ahead with their fellow white poor and citizens of good will
or history will again pass us by.”

Rustin put forth similar ideas around the same time in his seminal
essay “From Protest to Politics
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Here he was brutally honest about how little the civil rights movement
had addressed and the shifting terrain of the struggle. The fact that
more black people were unemployed and attending segregated schools in
1965 than they were in 1954 was due to the fact that these issues were
closely tied to economic dynamics. For Rustin, it was revealing that
the civil rights demands from the March on Washington were mostly
fulfilled (at least legally), while the major economic demands largely
were not.

Addressing the growing urban riots in the North, Rustin characterized
these as “outbursts of class aggression in a society where class and
color definitions are converging disastrously.” Perceptively, he
framed the urban riots as a product of economic dislocation caused by
automation: “Whatever the pace of this technological revolution may
be, the _direction_ is clear: the lower rungs of the economic ladder
are being lopped off.” Black workers, who were disproportionately
located in unskilled or semiskilled positions, would be the hardest
hit by these changes.

Manufacturing jobs as a total share of nonfarm employment hit its peak
in 1953, and at the same time, mechanization dramatically reduced
rural agricultural employment. In effect, working-class blacks
continued to stream into northern cities just as manufacturing jobs
were disappearing due to automation, offshoring, and relocation to the
suburbs.

Programmatically, sit-ins at lunch counters and similar kinds of
demonstrations no longer fit as tactics for this new period. Instead,
Rustin proposed a switch toward a political focus aimed at unleashing
federal funds for sweeping social democratic programs in the realm of
jobs, health care, housing and education. Such a shift would
inevitably involve the maintenance and expansion of the broad
multiracial coalition that had been on full display during the March
on Washington.

Using the newly formed A. Philip Randolph Institute (funded by the
AFL-CIO) as an organizational anchor, these ideas coalesced into the
1966 Freedom Budget for All Americans
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It was a comprehensive program of full employment, universal housing,
raising the minimum wage, national health care, and upgrading Social
Security. The plan represented nothing less than a radical
transformation of the United States into a democratic socialist
country.

While some have interpreted “From Protest to Politics” as
Rustin’s descent into moderate humdrum electoralism, his organizing
approach to the Freedom Budget throws this view into doubt. Over six
hundred endorsements were secured, including from the NAACP, SCLC,
Urban League, and most major labor unions. Organizers toured the
country drumming up support and facilitating workshops, and Rustin
drew up plans for a substantial congressional grassroots pressure
campaign involving youth groups.

The Freedom Budget framework was in direct contrast to the approach
sought by the Lyndon Johnson administration through the War on
Poverty. Drawing on the theories of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, War on
Poverty programs started from the premise that people were poor due to
lack of motivation or other personal deficiencies. These pathologies
were thought to be especially dire among the urban black poor. Missing
in all this was the fact that these programs were trying to prepare
people for jobs that increasingly no longer existed.

Rustin was ruthless in his criticisms of the War on Poverty, stating
that the numerous community-action programs suffered from the
“delusions that the poor can be helped to organize themselves out of
poverty.” Commenting on the misguided emphasis on motivation, Rustin
declared in “From Protest to Poltics,” “When Negro youth can
reasonably foresee a future free of slums, when the prospect of
gainful employment is realistic, we will see motivation and self-help
in abundant enough qualities.”

This critique was shared by many black trade unionists with a social
democratic outlook. Ernest Calloway
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the visionary education director of Teamsters Local 688 in St Louis,
said in one his essays that the War on Poverty “diverted from the
ferment of social change,” and that its main aim was to “contain
the ‘poor’ . . . without disturbing traditional economic and
political balances in the urban complex.”

The War on Poverty did, however, facilitate the rise of a new stratum
of black political leaders and administrators. Through programs like
Legal Services, Job Corps, and the Community Action Program, these
black politicos oversaw the disbursement of targeted and limited
federal aid to urban areas. In the process, new black political actors
were given access to the resources and technical know-how of local
public administration.

But unlike the more expansive reforms of the New Deal era, War on
Poverty programs did not fundamentally alter the relationship most
working-class black people had with the economy. Eventually, this same
stratum of black elites would oversee the steady retreat from the
social democratic tendency in black politics.

Cracks in the Coalition

The Freedom Budget effort could not withstand the fraying of the New
Deal/civil rights coalition. As the years of the Johnson
administration wore on, it was clear that the Vietnam War had sucked
up the bulk of the energy and financial resources. Irreconcilable
divisions arose within the civil rights movement as well.

Spurred by frustrations with the limits and slow pace of
antidiscrimination laws, “Black Power” emerged in 1966 as the
guiding slogan of a new generation of self-described black radicals.
While the term was emotionally powerful, its ambiguity left it open to
different and often contradictory interpretations. In his essay
“From Black Power to Black Establishment
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scholar Adolph Reed Jr
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“was always a concept in search of its object.”

Black ethnic electoral machines, “community control,” black
entrepreneurship, and armed revolution were all presented as
representing black power by various political actors. The first black
power conferences that attempted to flesh out its meaning often
produced a both contradictory and limited set of policy ideas. The
1967 Black Power conference in Newark put forth a fairly moderate
agenda that included the establishment of neighborhood credit unions,
“buy black” campaigns, the creation of black nonprofits, and
cooperative enterprises.

The first wave of urban black elected officials in the late 1960s and
early 1970s were often well meaning and had left-leaning inclinations,
but took power just as structural economic factors in cities took a
turn for the worse and made carrying out a progressive economic agenda
at the local level almost impossible.

Cedric Johnson, in his new book _After Black Lives Matter
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says of this cohort of black elected officials:

We should recall their predicament as urban managers with a mix of
scrutiny and a sense of nuance and tragedy, because governing through
the compounded fiscal and social crises of the seventies and eighties
meant making difficult choices with unforeseen and often regrettable
consequences.

This tension between local control and national economic factors
emerged publicly at the 1972 Gary Convention, which brought together
an incredibly broad range of black activists and elected officials.
NAACP president Roy Wilkins expressed concern that the strategy of
local black political control “would fetter black America forever
into the poorest and least influential sectors of national life.”

Richard Hatcher, the first black mayor of Gary, Indiana, noted that
the largest share of resources remained in the hands of multinational
corporations and federal agencies. These objections reflected the
national economic outlook present during the March on Washington.

Calls for black political control were also fairly easy to accommodate
without larger structural changes, as was seen in how a cohort of
black politicians cut their teeth administering War on Poverty
programs. In _Revolutionaries to Race Leaders
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Johnson points out, “Insurgent demands for black indigenous control
converged with liberal reform initiatives to produce a moderate black
political regime and incorporate radical dissent into conventional
political channels.”

Increasingly, the focus of racial politics for black political elites
became (and still remains) affirmative action policies that
disproportionately favor upwardly mobile minorities, high-status job
appointments, and minority business development. While in their own
way these policies attack forms of racial discrimination, they are
disconnected from the issues affecting the majority of black people.

The State of Black America

Currently, discussions of black poverty draw on psychology more than
political economy, and often reflect the same ideas of black cultural
deficiency and need for uplift as the War on Poverty. As just one
example, Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper
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focused almost exclusively on mentoring for black youth. But again, no
amount of role models can overcome the lack of good jobs and a
shrinking social safety net.

The current framework of anti-racism focuses more on individual
atonement and interpersonal relations instead of broader political
economy. According to Ibram X. Kendi
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perhaps the most acclaimed theorists of anti-racism today, “The
heartbeat of racism is denial, the heartbeat of antiracism is
confession.”

This framework has proved completely incapable in addressing the
horrific conditions so many black working people face today. Sixty
years after the March on Washington, black Americans face racial
inequalities and disparities in every measure of social welfare one
could think of.

Despite media narratives that focus almost exclusively on the “white
working class,” deindustrialization and the destruction of private
sector unions have been most devastating for black workers
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The auto industry, for example, was the second-largest employer of
black semiskilled production workers by the mid-1960s, surpassing one
hundred thousand in 1966. Represented by the UAW, these jobs offered
high wages, job security, and strong benefits.

By 2009, after decades of offshoring and attacks on unions, black
workers had under sixty thousand jobs in the auto industry. In
manufacturing overall, the percentage of black workers has plummeted
from 23 percent in 1979 to just 10 percent in 2007. It is in this
context of economic precarity that issues of police brutality and mass
incarceration have accelerated.

There were high hopes for the first black president, but the Obama
years were a period of continued decline for most black Americans. In
particular, black wealth was eviscerated
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the totally inadequate response to the housing crisis. Research from
the People’s Policy Project showed that black families especially
were steered into subprime mortgages, and after the crisis their
negative equity increased massively from 0.7 percent to 14.2 percent.

The public sector
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a bastion of secure, unionized employment for many black
workers. Twenty percent of black workers
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employed in the public sector, and these workers make almost 25
percent more in wages than their counterparts in the private sector.
But these jobs, and the public services that black communities
disproportionately rely on, are in jeopardy as the bipartisan
neoliberal onslaught of austerity continues.

The failure of neoliberal Democrats to address these compounding
crises has led to some troubling trends in black voting patterns. As
historian Matt Karp observes
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congressional Democratic margins among black working-class voters have
dropped by eleven points overall. Though the movement is still small,
the Republican Party is gaining ground with less educated
African-American voters.

Which Way Forward?

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a brief moment where
black politics was part of a broader movement for economic
transformation, looms over us in this period of multiple crises facing
black America (and the entire working class, for that matter). It
should serve as a reminder of the possibility of a politics that is
coalitional yet radical as we chart a way forward.

There are many encouraging signs that today a large segment of black
Americans support the kind of social democratic politics that molded
the March on Washington. Despite a constant media drumbeat claiming
the contrary, in 2020 black voters overall
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supported the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Among black
voters under age thirty-five
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led the pack of Democratic primary candidates. This fact is consistent
with black voters’ long-held support of broadly redistributive
economic policies.

Black workers are the most likely among any ethnic group to be union
members, a trend that began as far back as the 1940s. Rebuilding the
labor movement will be crucial for fighting racial inequality, as
a plethora of studies
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shown.

Despite a lot of discourse on the black/white wealth gap and wage gap,
somehow unions are usually left out of the discussion of solutions to
this persistent problem. According to the Economic Policy Institute,
among nonunion families the median white family has more than $7 in
wealth for every $1 held by the median black family. Among union
families, this ratio is only half as large.

Fortunately, we are in the midst of an uptick of labor militancy and
pro-union sentiments among the broader public. While we don’t know
yet how far this all will go, the Teamsters’ contract fight at UPS
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the upcoming showdown between the UAW and the Big Three
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big implications for scores of blue-collar black workers.

Our conceptions of fighting racial inequality today have to include
broader issues such as defending and expanding the public sector,
building a thriving labor movement, universal social programs, and a
bold national-level jobs program. This approach can put us on the path
to fulfilling the full mission of the March on Washington. Only then
can the dream of both jobs and freedom become a reality.

_Paul Prescod is a Jacobin contributing editor._

* March on Washington
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* Radicalism
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* union organizing
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* Institutionalized Racism
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