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MAMDANI, RANDOLPH, RUSTIN, KING: THEIR CASE FOR UNIVERSAL, RATHER
THAN PARTICULARISTIC, SOCIAL POLICIES  
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Harold Meyerson
October 2, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin’s Freedom Budget is the key
to understanding the appeal of the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor.
The class-based universalistic politics of the socialists of the 60s
and ’70s hold important lessons for today. _

Zohran Mamdani, Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City,
speaking last month., Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx // The American
Prospect

 

Sixty years ago, the leaders of the civil rights movement faced an
unavoidable question: What now? In successive summers, Congress had
enacted the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The
South’s _de jure_ segregation and denial of Black citizenship were
no more; the battle for equality before the law appeared to be
settled. The battle for social and economic equality, however, was
only just beginning.

Even before the legislative triumphs, the instigators, organizers, and
leaders of the 1963 March on Washington understood that their fight
had to become a much broader social revolution. On the day after the
march, they convened a conference to discuss what they could do to
make that happen. The conference was sponsored by the Socialist Party,
which, despite its minuscule membership, contained within its ranks
the instigators and organizers of the march.

The keynote speakers at the conference were the instigator, the
venerable socialist A. Philip Randolph, and the organizer,
Randolph’s deputy Bayard Rustin. Randolph’s socialist activism
dated back to the 1910s, when his newspaper urged Blacks to oppose
U.S. participation in World War I. In the 1930s, as president of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, he astounded and alarmed business
leaders and delighted Black Americans when his union won recognition
and a contract from the reactionary Pullman Company. In the early
1940s, with war looming, his threat of a march on then-segregated
Washington, D.C. (which 100,000 Blacks had pledged to join) compelled
President Roosevelt to meet Randolph’s demand for a ban on racial
discrimination in defense plants. In 1948, a similar Randolph threat
compelled President Truman to order the desegregation of the armed
forces.

In late 1962, Randolph and Rustin proposed a march for the following
year—the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation
Proclamation—centered on job creation. The Emancipation March for
Jobs set a bold vision, that the civil rights struggles of Blacks
“may now be the catalyst which mobilizes all workers behind the
demands for a broad and fundamental program for economic justice.”
But in the early spring of 1963, the nonviolent campaign to
desegregate Birmingham, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King Jr., was
met by a violent response from the Birmingham police, who set dogs,
nightsticks, and fire hoses on children and adults, all captured on
television newscasts. The ensuing uproar compelled President Kennedy
to call on Congress to enact a civil rights law requiring the
desegregation of private and public facilities. Randolph and Rustin
added that demand—and successfully urged that the legislation also
include a section requiring a ban on discrimination in employment—to
their march’s agenda, which they renamed the March on Washington for
Jobs and Freedom.

The class-based universalistic politics of the socialists of the 1960s
and ’70s hold important lessons for the socialists of 2025.

The march, organized by Rustin, was of course a historic success,
climaxing in King’s address, and providing major momentum to enact
the civil rights legislation of the next two years.

At the Socialist Party’s follow-up conference, Randolph laid out his
ideas for the future. Pointing out that white sharecroppers had civil
rights but lived in abject poverty, he said, “We must liberate not
only ourselves but our white brothers and sisters.” Rustin followed
by declaring a need for economic planning that would deal with the
technological unemployment he saw coming in the auto and steel plants
that employed large numbers of Black men.

By 1965, after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting
Rights Act, Randolph, Rustin, and King turned even more forcefully to
the economic policies they saw as imperative if Blacks were ever to
achieve social as well as legal equality. They believed Lyndon
Johnson’s War on Poverty, while good as far as it went, fell
lamentably short of remedying the inequality hardwired into the
economy. Their advocacy steered clear of programs specifically
directed to help Blacks and other racial minorities, focusing instead
on huge economic reforms that would, in Kennedy’s famous phrase,
lift all boats.

They had ample reason to think that a white backlash would follow
policies aimed only at helping racial minorities, and not just in the
South. In the 1964 Democratic presidential primaries (which were held
in only a handful of states), Alabama Gov. George Wallace, the
nation’s foremost champion of segregation and virulent racism, took
34 percent of the vote in Wisconsin and 30 percent in Indiana.

The new civil rights laws did nothing, and the War on Poverty programs
precious little, to alleviate the pervasive poverty, ghettoization,
and systemic police abuse of Blacks in Northern cities. The 1965 Watts
Riots made clear that those ghettos were powder kegs that needed only
one more police outrage to explode. So later that year, Randolph
announced that he’d “call upon the leaders of the Freedom Movement
to meet together with economists and social scientists to work out a
‘Freedom Budget’” that spelled out how the nation could
achieve _de facto_—not just _de jure_—equality.

RANDOLPH, RUSTIN, AND KING, standard-bearers of this Freedom Movement,
were all avowed democratic socialists. Chief among the academic and
union economists who worked with them on developing the budget was
Leon Keyserling. As an attorney and economist on the staff of New York
Sen. Robert Wagner in the 1930s, Keyserling had actually written most
of the text of both the Social Security Act and the National Labor
Relations Act. In the following years, he’d held multiple posts in
both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, arguing for planned
full employment and higher minimum wages. (His advocacy led Truman and
the Congress to enact what is still the greatest percentage increase
in the federal minimum wage.)

When the Freedom Budget was released in late 1966, it called for
planned full employment, income provision for those who couldn’t be
employed, universal medical care, higher minimum wages, new housing to
replace the nation’s 9.3 million “seriously deficient housing
units,” the eradication of air and water pollution, and preservation
of the nation’s natural resources, among other social necessities.
It was Keyserling’s achievement that it did so without running a
deficit or raising tax rates. By mandating a high level of production
and planned full employment, the budget penciled out so that revenues
coming in to the government would grow to provide an additional $185
billion over the next ten years that could fund its proposals, without
diminishing the billions needed to fund other government activities.
Full employment was the key, boosting the number of taxpayers, the
level of their wages, and the government’s revenues.

We need to recall that in 1966, the highest marginal federal income
tax rate was 70 percent (today, it’s 37 percent); the federal
corporate tax rate was 53 percent (it’s 21 percent today); and the
rate of private-sector unionization was 30 percent (it’s 6 percent
today). Keyserling’s numbers were based on the more egalitarian
income and tax rates in place when he wrote.

The only real way to produce a social revolution for America’s
Blacks was to produce a social revolution for all Americans.

To say that the odds against the Freedom Budget’s adoption were
steep is an understatement. It presupposed that the burst of liberal
legislation that came out of the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress of
1965 would continue, yet the Democratic majorities were quickly
diminished in the 1966 midterms. The budget also failed to account for
the growing spending on the Vietnam War—and by ignoring the moral as
well as financial costs of the war, it failed to reach out to and
interest its most natural constituency—liberal and left-liberal
anti-war activists.

With the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, hopes for any of the
budget being even partly enacted abruptly ended. When Jimmy Carter
recaptured the White House for the Democrats in 1976, alongside a
lopsidedly Democratic Congress, a movement for full employment
emerged. It was backed by the more progressive unions, embodied
legislatively in the Humphrey-Hawkins bill setting full employment
targets for the government, and led intellectually by socialist
Michael Harrington, who argued in print and on podiums that planned
full employment was the only way to create the kind of broad economic
security necessary for the public to support a comprehensive
progressive agenda. (Harrington explained how planned full employment
in the Nordic social democracies gave those nations the political
space to enact other progressive policies—feminist, environmental,
and so on.) Harrington also assembled a coalition of unions and newer
social movements in support of both Humphrey-Hawkins and the broader
cause.

Carter and centrist Democrats in the Congress so watered down
Humphrey-Hawkins, however, that the enacted version made no real
impact on the nation’s economy. Still, as late as the 1992
Democratic presidential primaries, before neoliberalism had captured
not just the Republicans but most of the Democratic Party as well,
candidate Bill Clinton would occasionally refer to Sweden’s full
employment policies as something the U.S. would do well to emulate.

WHAT REMAINS CLEAR NEARLY 60 YEARS after the Freedom Budget is the
conviction of its authors—Randolph wrote its introduction, King
wrote its foreword, and Rustin supervised its production—that the
only real way to produce a social revolution for America’s Blacks
was to produce a social revolution for all Americans. The Black
nationalism, Black separatism, and Black capitalism that also began to
surge once the government had struck down _de jure_ segregation,
they believed, wouldn’t and couldn’t change the contours of the
nation’s economy in a way that could alleviate Black poverty. In a
speech Rustin delivered shortly after the budget was unveiled, at a
time when both Black nationalism and white backlash were on the rise,
he said that any viable strategy had to be addressed “equally to
Negro frustration and white fear.”

The Urban League’s Whitney Young eagerly endorsed the Freedom
Budget, but he also backed a policy that stood in stark contrast to
the budget’s universalism. He argued that the government should set
quotas for hiring and advancing Blacks in public- and private-sector
jobs, and in colleges and unions. An attenuated version of that
proposal became a key part of various affirmative action programs, and
over the years won considerable support from the one sector of white
society with which the Urban League interacted most: corporate elites,
who could admit Blacks and other minorities to their ranks without the
kind of reversals to power relationships (and, despite Keyserling’s
calculations, higher taxes) to which the Freedom Budget could lead. To
be sure, Young and his successors still favored many of the social
programs spelled out in the budget and subsequent progressive
legislation, just as the successors to Randolph and Rustin were to
support affirmative action in the absence of the kind of sweeping
changes their budget called for.

But today, as Idrees Kahloon recently documented
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New Yorker_, the past half-century of affirmative action and DEI have
failed to move the needle in reducing the still vast gap between Black
and white wealth and income. Politically, such policies were in
retreat well before Donald Trump attained and then regained state
power. Kahloon argues that the sole remaining path forward to reduce
our soaring economic and social inequality is the kind of class-based
universalism embodied in the long-forgotten Freedom Budget. I’d add
that the downward mobility of the American working class in recent
decades makes such universalism more politically plausible than it was
in 1966.

The class-based universalistic politics of the socialists of the 1960s
and ’70s hold important lessons for the socialists of 2025. One
socialist who understands those lessons in his very bones is New York
mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, whose affordability agenda steers
clear of a multitude of more particularist agendas—some very worthy,
some less so—in favor of policies directed at the broadest possible
population of poor and working-class, middle-class, and even
upper-middle-class New Yorkers. While New York city government has no
real power over levels of employment, much less full employment, it
does have power over municipal provision of such services as child
care and rent controls.

At a time when nationalism, xenophobia, and racism are all around us,
socialism certainly should be universalistic. As it happens,
class-based universalism is also the most pragmatic course for
progressive initiatives in America today. That Democrats of all
tendencies have embraced varieties of affordability platforms
illustrates the appeal of sharply drawn but universally targeted
economic policies. In his class-based, universal, and very pragmatic
socialism, Mamdani is the proper heir to Randolph, Rustin, and King.

_[Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.]_

_This article appears in the October 2025
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Prospect magazine. Subscribe here
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_Used with the permission. © The American Prospect
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM
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* democratic socialist
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* socialism
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* Civil Rights
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* Martin Luther King
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* Martin Luther King Jr.
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* A. Philip Randolph
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* Bayard Rustin
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* Freedom Budget
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* March on Washington
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* Politics
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* Race & Ethnicity
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* Poverty & Wealth
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* Inequality
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* Economic Policy
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