[August 28th was the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington.
Ignore the lies and distortions — the reality, as the latest
research shows, is that scores of socialists influenced or were
themselves key figures in the civil rights movement.]
[[link removed]]

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT WAS FILLED TO THE BRIM WITH LEFTISTS  
[[link removed]]


 

Matthew F. Nichter interviewed by Shawn Gude
August 28, 2023
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ August 28th was the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington.
Ignore the lies and distortions — the reality, as the latest
research shows, is that scores of socialists influenced or were
themselves key figures in the civil rights movement. _

Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King lead a voting rights
march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965. (William
Lovelace / Daily Express / Hulton Archive // Jacobin),

 

The [thing] nobody wants to say . . . or doesn’t know to say,”
said Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, an executive director of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the mid-1960s, “is that
the people around [Martin Luther King Jr], and Dr. King himself — we
were all left-wingers.”

Walker knew of what he spoke. A member of the Young Communist League
in the 1940s, he retained his left-wing politics well into the
sixties, commenting in a 1963 TV interview that “granting to the
Negro full emancipation means a readjustment of the entire economy. .
. . I think it’s an inevitable move toward some kind of
socialism.”

This image of King and his cohort as committed radicals defies their
popular portrayal as “I Have a Dream” moderates. But in
an important new article
[[link removed]] drawing
on years of painstaking research, scholar Matt Nichter reports that
Walker was basically right. The SCLC — the famed group of black
ministers, first helmed by King himself — was suffused with
“personnel overlap,” “network ties,” and “organizational
alliances” with the socialist and communist left of the 1930s and
1940s, often referred to as the Old Left.

“Red” unions like the United Packinghouse Workers
[[link removed]] infused
the SCLC coffers with crucial early funding. SCLC leaders cut their
teeth in Old Left organizations like the National Negro Congress and
the Southern Negro Youth Congress. King’s teachers and mentors
surrounded him with left-wing ideas as a young man. Together, such
figures and institutions embodied a tradition of “civil rights
unionism
[[link removed]]”
that looked askance at capitalism and viewed mass working-class
action
[[link removed]] and
interracial unionism as anti-racist bludgeons.

As we celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom
[[link removed]] —
and as establishment figures push a shallow anti-racism — much of
the history and tradition that Nichter chronicles has been forgotten
or suppressed. _Jacobin_’s Shawn Gude spoke with Nichter about the
Old Left’s deep influence on the civil rights movement, the
connection between labor and racial justice struggles, and the
tradition of civil rights unionism in a post–George Floyd moment
when labor is weak but stirring. 

...

SHAWN GUDE

You note early in the article that the intense redbaiting of the 1950s
and 60s led many in SCLC to hide their past leftist affiliations or
present radicalism. What was the research like for this project? It
seems you were doing lots of detective work, finding scraps of
evidence and then piecing them together.

MATTHEW F. NICHTER

For starters, I needed to figure out where these folks grew up, where
they went to college or seminary — basic biographical information
that you’d think would be easy to find, but often isn’t for folks
who aren’t famous. And then I had to figure out which Old Left
organizations had a presence in those places. From there, I could try
to determine whether these SCLC activists had been involved in the Old
Left.

The evidence I present in the article is drawn from more than thirty
archival collections, sixty black and left-wing periodicals, and
several dozen oral history interviews. I also looked at lots of
government surveillance reports, which obviously couldn’t be taken
at face value, but which often contained clues that enabled me to
track down more reliable forms of evidence.

It was a slow process. The project was over a decade in the making.

 

SHAWN GUDE  What is the conventional story about the role of
socialists and leftists in the Civil Rights Movement, and what did you
find looking specifically at the SCLC?

MATTHEW F. NICHTER  Among the general public, there’s not much
awareness that the socialist movement of the 1930s, 1940s, and early
1950s helped shape the civil rights movement of the mid-1950s and
1960s. The popular image is of ministers and college students, who are
seen as admirable — but communists and socialists, not so much.
Though I should qualify by saying that among leftist activists today,
there’s a growing awareness that the story is more complex, thanks
in part to publications like _Jacobin_.

Among historians who study African American politics and protest,
it’s well established that during the 1930s and 1940s the Old
Left was absolutely central
[[link removed]] to
various anti-racist campaigns. But historians also know that
McCarthyism decimated
[[link removed]] the
Old Left during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

My research builds on the work of scholars who have shown that many
Old Left activists survived the post-World War II red scare, and went
on to play important roles in the civil rights movement — people
like Bayard Rustin
[[link removed]], Ella
Baker
[[link removed]], Anne
Braden
[[link removed]], Jack
O’Dell
[[link removed]],
and Stanley Levison
[[link removed]].
But I think this phenomenon was much more pervasive than scholars have
realized.

I found that one-third of SCLC’s elected officers in 1961 had Old
Left backgrounds, as did half of the executive directors from SCLC’s
founding through the mid-1960s; half of the program directors during
that same period; and roughly two-thirds of the Research Committee,
King’s informal advisory group during the mid-1960s.

This article is about SCLC, but I’ve also done a lot of research on
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of
Racial Equity (CORE), and the story is similar. But I focused on SCLC
for this piece, because I thought it was in some ways a “hard
case.”

SHAWN GUDE  Right, they’re supposed to be these staid ministers.

MATTHEW F. NICHTER  There’s a myth that the Old Left was strictly
secular, but socialist and communist groups collaborated with — and
often recruited — religious believers.

Another common assumption is that the Old Left was overwhelmingly
white, which just isn’t true.

SHAWN GUDE  So let’s talk a bit about the Old Left itself. What
were some of the organizations that made up the Old Left, and what was
the Old Left’s view, in general, about the relationship between
class oppression and racial oppression, as well as the best way to
fight racial tyranny in the US?

MATTHEW F. NICHTER  In the article, I define the Old Left broadly,
to include organizations in which socialists and communists of various
stripes played central roles. By the 1940s, most Old Left activists
had drawn the conclusion that you can’t effectively fight the boss,
especially in a place like America where racial divisions are so
entrenched, unless you are actively fighting racism. So Old Left
activists helped launch and lead a panoply of militant anti-racist
organizations.

Members of the Southern Negro Youth Congress meet with Idaho Senator
Glen Taylor in 1947.    (Wikimedia Commons)
The article mentions dozens of these organizations, some of them well
studied, others more obscure. Among the organizations that cropped up
repeatedly in the backgrounds of the SCLC cadre I studied were
the National Negro Congress
[[link removed]],
the Southern Negro Youth Congress
[[link removed]],
the Southern Conference Educational Fund
[[link removed]],
the Progressive Party
[[link removed]], and
various left-led labor unions
[[link removed]]. 

SHAWN GUDE  What were Martin Luther King Jr’s connections to the
Old Left?

MATTHEW F. NICHTER  The first thing to bear in mind is that King
lived through the tail end of the Great Depression as a boy, and saw
breadlines all over Atlanta. As a teenager in the mid-1940s, when he
attended college, the Old Left was still a powerful force in the
United States — this is before McCarthyism is in high gear.

At Morehouse College, where King studied as an undergraduate, there
were an array of scholar-activists on campus who were not particularly
secretive about their leftist sympathies. King’s mentor at
Morehouse, Benjamin Mays, was an exponent of the social gospel who
served on the board of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the
Southern Conference Educational Fund, and several other organizations.

Another mentor of King’s during this period, Brailsford Brazeal, was
the leading scholarly authority on the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, and served on the board of Highlander Folk School. Samuel
Williams, King’s philosophy professor, was a statewide leader of the
Progressive Party. King’s religion professor, George Kelsey,
published anti-capitalist tracts. King’s sociology professor, Walter
Chivers, was president of the Atlanta University affiliate of a
left-led union that tried to organize the AU faculty. Several of
King’s professors and friends at Morehouse were active in the
Southern Negro Youth Congress, which had a chapter on campus.

Martin Luther King Jr at the March on Washington. (Wikimedia Commons)
At Crozer [Theological Seminary], King had progressive mentors like
Rev. J. Pius Barbour, and read the works of socialist theologians,
such as Reinhold Niebuhr’s _Moral Man in Immoral Society_. He also
read Marx’s _Capital_, mostly agreeing
[[link removed]] with
Marx’s critique of capitalism, but rejecting his atheism.

At Boston University (BU), where King pursued his doctoral studies,
deans Walter G. Muelder and Howard Thurman were pacifists and
socialists, as were philosopher Edgar S. Brightman and theologian Paul
Schilling. King’s dissertation advisor, Harold DeWolf, wasn’t a
self-described socialist or pacifist, but he stuck his neck out to
criticize the House Un-American Activities Committee and published an
article titled “Was Jesus a Communist?” that took the question
seriously. Coretta Scott was a former Progressive Party activist who
gifted King the classic socialist novel by Edward Bellamy, _Looking
Backward_. King led a circle of BU grad students who called themselves
The Dialectical Society and which included folks like Douglas Moore,
another former Progressive Party activist who would later help launch
SCLC.

Benjamin Mays at the University of Chicago in 1921. (Wikimedia
Commons)
I think an important shift occurred during the 1955–56 Montgomery
bus boycott, when King discovered that Old Left activists and networks
could provide much-needed assistance to a major civil rights struggle.
Locally in Montgomery, King leaned on the skills of several black and
white activists with backgrounds in the Old Left broadly construed,
including Cliff and Virginia Durr, E. D. Nixon, and Rosa Parks. King
also benefited from the fundraising and strategic advice of In
Friendship, an organization based in New York City, cofounded by Old
Left veterans Rustin, Baker, and Levison, with the backing of A.
Philip Randolph.

SHAWN GUDE  This is somewhat speculative, but to what extent do you
think these ties shaped his own politics, and did they push him to
think or strategize about fighting racism in a particular way? 

MATTHEW F. NICHTER  In King’s first book, _Stride Toward
Freedom_ (1958), there’s a section where he argues that the civil
rights movement and the labor movement should be supporting each
other. King knew this wasn’t going to happen automatically; he
recognized that there were progressive unions and conservative unions.

But the idea that labor and civil rights struggles could and should be
joined was a commonplace within the intellectual and activist circles
that King moved in. He reiterated this argument repeatedly, for
example in _Why We Can’t Wait_ (1964), where he wrote: “The
withholding of support from the March on Washington by the National
Council of the AFL-CIO was a blunder. . . . Nothing would hold back
the forces of progress in American life more effectively than a schism
between the Negro and organized labor.”

By the late 1960s, socialism for King goes from being a lofty but
distant dream, mostly discussed in private, to a strategic imperative
that he starts talking about more openly.

I only touch on this briefly in my article, but I think that by the
late 1960s, socialism for King went from being a lofty but distant
dream, mostly discussed in private, to a strategic imperative that he
started talking about more openly. With the escalation of the Vietnam
War and urban uprisings across the United States, King concluded that
we have to connect the struggles for economic justice, for racial
justice, and against militarism, or we’re not going to win on any of
these fronts.

SHAWN GUDE  You talk about many, many figures from SCLC with Old
Left connections in the piece, so we can’t go through them all, but
were there any that really stuck out or surprised you?

MATTHEW F. NICHTER  The thing that surprised me the most was the
prominent SCLC leaders whose Old Left backgrounds have flown
completely under the radar until now. For example, Rev. Joseph Lowery
served as Second Vice President of SCLC for most of the 1960s. Shortly
before his death a few years ago, he received the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, and rightly so.

During the mid-1940s, Lowery lived in Birmingham, Alabama, which was
the stronghold of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), a
broad-tent anti-racist organization with many communists in leadership
positions. When I emailed Rev. Lowery to ask if he was familiar with
the SNYC, he acknowledged that he had “participated in some
activities” sponsored by the group. I combed local newspapers and
SNYC organizational records, and learned that Lowery led a SNYC
recruitment drive in an industrial suburb of Birmingham. He also
helped the organization investigate the death of Willie Daniel
[[link removed]], a black man murdered in a
store by a white security guard.

In the article, I try to contextualize why someone like Lowery, who
was not a communist by any stretch, would be attracted to a group like
the SNYC. In those days, if you were a young person who wanted to
fight back against segregation, disenfranchisement, racist murders,
and evictions, that’s where the action was. The Old Left was often
in the forefront of anti-racist struggles.

SHAWN GUDE  C. T. Vivian is another figure that isn’t super
obscure, but his Old Left background isn’t well known.

MATTHEW F. NICHTER  Rev. Vivian is another towering figure in the
civil rights movement, who like Lowery received the Presidential Medal
of Freedom for his lifetime of service to the cause of racial justice.
Before becoming an SCLC staffer, Vivian helped lead the nonviolent
movement in Nashville, was arrested for participating in the Freedom
Rides, etc. During the mid-1960s, he served as SCLC’s Director of
Affiliates.

The received wisdom is that Vivian first experimented with direct
action protest in Peoria during the 1940s, where he and a group of
mostly middle-class professionals and students sat in at segregated
restaurants, inspired by what the recently formed CORE was doing in
Chicago.

Vivian was close friends with a guy named Ajay Martin, a young African
American union activist who became a national officer of the FE, a
left-led union.

All this is true, but I found that Vivian was also part of another
activist network
[[link removed]] during
that same period, comprised mainly of blue-collar workers employed at
Peoria’s Caterpillar tractor factory. Vivian was close friends with
a guy named Ajay Martin, a young African American union activist who
became a national officer of the United Farm Equipment and Metal
Workers
[[link removed]] (FE),
a left-led union. Vivian remembered Martin as “one of the greatest
guys I’ve ever met. . . . Here was a man that couldn’t be bought.
Here was a man who had integrity. Here was a man who stood up.”
Martin ended up resigning from the FE executive board in 1948 because
he refused to sign an anti-communist affidavit as required by
the Taft-Hartley Act
[[link removed]].

 

SHAWN GUDE  We’re talking on the eve of the sixtieth anniversary
of the March on Washington. How should this history of the connections
between SCLC and the Old Left shape how we think about the March on
Washington?

MATTHEW F. NICHTER  It’s a good example of how the strategies and
ideas of the Old Left carried over to an extent,  because the
architects of the March had
[[link removed]] Old
Left backgrounds — including A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and
Cleveland Robinson, a leader of the Negro American Labor Council and
the District 65 union in New York City.

Bayard Rustin and Cleveland Robinson outside the headquarters of the
March on Washington. (Wikimedia Commons)
The march itself combined demands for stronger civil rights
legislation, raising the minimum wage, and a massive federal jobs
program. It was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — not
for one or the other. Randolph spoke at the march and highlighted the
multifaceted nature of the struggle. So I think that’s one clear
example of how the attempt to link the struggle for economic justice
and racial justice manifested in the 1960s.

SHAWN GUDE  Let’s jump to today. The labor movement is very weak,
yet there’s lots of evidence that many of the young people involved
in the current unionization upsurge were politicized or radicalized by
the George Floyd protests. How do you think this long-buried tradition
that you’ve been talking about should inform current struggles
against racial oppression?

MATTHEW F. NICHTER  I think the labor movement can play an important
role in anti-racist struggles, especially if the multiracial left
contends for influence and leadership in the labor movement. But to
put it bluntly: the Left needs to walk and chew gum. It’s not one or
the other: fighting for class demands, or fighting against racism. We
need to fight against all forms of injustice and inequality in
workplaces and in the wider society. Differences and disagreements
aside, that is something the Old Left can teach us. But this lesson
has been forgotten to some extent, partly because of McCarthyism.

I also think we need to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter (BLM)
activists today are navigating a complicated terrain. On the one hand,
the movement faced vicious repression at hands of police at the height
of the struggle, followed now by a vitriolic racist backlash stoked by
neanderthal Republicans. On the other hand, there have been aggressive
cooptation efforts by liberal politicians and NGOs.

The fact that you’ve got young people, millions of them, who have
taken to the streets, have braved cops and tear gas — that desire to
fight back, that willingness to shut things down to win change,
doesn’t just vanish because a wave of struggle ebbs.

The backdrop to all this is the weakness of the labor movement, and of
the Left within it. Rebuilding the labor left is strategically
critical, but it’s also a long-term project. We shouldn’t be
surprised that BLM folks aren’t putting all their eggs in the labor
basket. Civil rights activists in the 1950s and sixties didn’t
either. Someone like King was looking for opportunities to build
coalitions and collaboration with labor. SCLC leaders regularly spoke
at union gatherings. King died supporting a labor struggle in Memphis.
But they were also building SCLC, a civil rights organization.

All that said, I’m optimistic that BLM, especially since 2020, is
helping reinvigorate labor, as you suggested. The fact that you’ve
got young people, millions of them, who have taken to the streets,
have braved cops and tear gas — that desire to fight back, that
willingness to shut things down to win change, doesn’t just vanish
because a wave of struggle ebbs. That sentiment often bleeds into
other spheres, including the workplace. So I’m optimistic that that
wave of struggle can, and is helping, reinvigorate labor.

There’s a precedent for this. In the 1960s, the civil rights,
antiwar, and feminist movements helped reinvigorate the labor
movement. Folks that were protesting for other things and learning how
to organize, gaining confidence in their own power, carried that
boldness and those skills into other arenas.

I’m optimistic that that wave of struggle can, and is helping, to
reinvigorate labor. In the 1960s, the civil rights, anti-war, and
feminist movements helped reinvigorate the labor movement.

The Old Left had a lot of problems and weaknesses, and I don’t want
to make it sound like solidarity is automatic or easy. But I think
they were on to something when they said: capitalism relies on
divide-and-conquer tactics to survive. You can only get so far
fighting the bosses and their politicians if you’re not challenging
all the divisions within the working class. Labor struggles are a
context in which it’s possible — again, not inevitable, but
possible — to break down prejudices. And historically, socialists
have played a really important role in advancing those kinds of
struggles.

The march itself combined demands for stronger civil rights
legislation, raising the minimum wage, and a massive federal jobs
program. It was the March on Washington for Jobs _and_ Freedom —
not for one or the other. Randolph spoke at the march
[[link removed]] and
highlighted the multifaceted nature of the struggle. So I think
that’s one clear example of how the attempt to link the struggle for
economic justice and racial justice manifested in the 1960s.

SHAWN GUDE  Let’s jump to today. The labor movement is very weak,
yet there’s lots of evidence that many of the young people involved
in the current unionization upsurge were politicized or radicalized by
the George Floyd protests. How do you think this long-buried tradition
that you’ve been talking about should inform current struggles
against racial oppression?

MATTHEW F. NICHTER  I think the labor movement can play an important
role in anti-racist struggles, especially if the multiracial left
contends for influence and leadership in the labor movement. But to
put it bluntly: the Left needs to walk and chew gum. It’s not one or
the other: fighting for class demands, or fighting against racism. We
need to fight against all forms of injustice and inequality in
workplaces and in the wider society. Differences and disagreements
aside, that is something the Old Left can teach us. But this lesson
has been forgotten to some extent, partly because of McCarthyism.

I also think we need to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter (BLM)
activists today are navigating a complicated terrain. On the one hand,
the movement faced vicious repression at hands of police at the height
of the struggle, followed now by a vitriolic racist backlash stoked by
neanderthal Republicans. On the other hand, there have been aggressive
cooptation efforts by liberal politicians and NGOs.

The fact that you’ve got young people, millions of them, who have
taken to the streets, have braved cops and tear gas — that desire to
fight back, that willingness to shut things down to win change,
doesn’t just vanish because a wave of struggle ebbs.

The backdrop to all this is the weakness of the labor movement, and of
the Left within it. Rebuilding the labor left is strategically
critical, but it’s also a long-term project. We shouldn’t be
surprised that BLM folks aren’t putting all their eggs in the labor
basket. Civil rights activists in the 1950s and sixties didn’t
either. Someone like King was looking for opportunities to build
coalitions and collaboration with labor. SCLC leaders regularly spoke
at union gatherings. King died supporting a labor struggle in Memphis.
But they were also building SCLC, a civil rights organization.

All that said, I’m optimistic that BLM, especially since 2020, is
helping reinvigorate labor, as you suggested. The fact that you’ve
got young people, millions of them, who have taken to the streets,
have braved cops and tear gas — that desire to fight back, that
willingness to shut things down to win change, doesn’t just vanish
because a wave of struggle ebbs. That sentiment often bleeds into
other spheres, including the workplace. So I’m optimistic that that
wave of struggle can, and is helping, reinvigorate labor.

There’s a precedent for this. In the 1960s, the civil rights,
antiwar, and feminist movements helped reinvigorate
[[link removed]] the labor movement. Folks that
were protesting for other things and learning how to organize, gaining
confidence in their own power, carried that boldness and those skills
into other arenas
[[link removed]].

I’m optimistic that that wave of struggle can, and is helping, to
reinvigorate labor. In the 1960s, the civil rights, anti-war, and
feminist movements helped reinvigorate the labor movement.

The Old Left had a lot of problems and weaknesses, and I don’t want
to make it sound like solidarity is automatic or easy. But I think
they were on to something when they said: capitalism relies on
divide-and-conquer tactics to survive. You can only get so far
fighting the bosses and their politicians if you’re not challenging
all the divisions within the working class. Labor struggles are a
context in which it’s possible — again, not inevitable, but
possible — to break down prejudices
[[link removed]]. And
historically, socialists have played a really important role
in advancing those kinds of struggles
[[link removed]].

_[MATTHEW F. NICHTER is associate professor of sociology at Rollins
College._

_SHAWN GUDE is a senior editor at Jacobin. He is currently writing a
biography of Eugene Debs.]_

_Our new issue on the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War is out
now. Subscribe today for just $20 to get it in print!
[[link removed]]_

* 1963 march on washington
[[link removed]]
* civil rights movement
[[link removed]]
* Martin Luther King
[[link removed]]
* MLK
[[link removed]]
* Southern Negro Youth Congress
[[link removed]]
* SNYC
[[link removed]]
* student nonviolent coordinating committee
[[link removed]]
* SNCC
[[link removed]]
* Southern Christian Leadership Conference
[[link removed]]
* SCLC
[[link removed]]
* Congress of Racial Equality
[[link removed]]
* CORE
[[link removed]]
* National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
[[link removed]]
* NAACP
[[link removed]]
* Bayard Rustin
[[link removed]]
* A Philip Randolph
[[link removed]]
* Ella Baker
[[link removed]]
* Rosa Parks
[[link removed]]
* Communist Party
[[link removed]]
* Jack O'Dell
[[link removed]]
* Anne Braden
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

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