That Time Martin Luther King Jr. Said The Three Sentences About Racism Republicans Have Ever Heard
That Time Martin Luther King Jr. Said The Three Sentences About Racism Republicans Have Ever Heard
August 28, 1963, in labor history!
On August 28, 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place in Washington DC. This famous event is of course most often remembered for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, or more specifically the three lines of it that conservatives have decided justify their own positions. But even among liberals and Civil Rights activists what is often forgotten or downplayed in the memory of this event is the central role economic issues played in it. Most of the economic agenda of the 1960s Civil Rights movement in fact is barely remembered. That’s a huge problem because not only were African-Americans fighting for the opportunity for economic advancement as well as to end segregation and for the vote, but also because it presents an incomplete history which takes away part of the reason this movement so challenged American life.
First, it’s worth noting that the original idea for the March on Washington came from a union. In 1941, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters President A. Philip Randolph called for a march on Washington to protest hiring discrimination in defense plants as the nation was gearing up for World War II. Like with most issues concerning minorities, FDR didn’t really care — but he didn’t want the bad publicity, so he caved and ordered the end of hiring discrimination on government defense contracts. This opened up a lot of jobs to African-Americans during World War II and helped build the Black middle class that would do much to push forward the freedom struggle after the war.
Randolph was still active in the movement in 1963, although more as a senior figure than a major player. But he, Bayard Rustin, and others revived the idea of the march to push John F. Kennedy to do something on Civil Rights, which he had been frustratingly reluctant to do. Rustin was hired to organize the event. Rustin had been a communist in the past and that greatly worried anti-communists like the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins (who did not even want to make a statement about the death of W.E.B. DuBois at the March because he hated him for his communism — but who did when he realized Randolph would do it and it would be favorable). But Rustin had played a role in the planning for the 1941 march and he had Randolph’s trust. Rustin was also gay, which worried a lot of the sexually conservative Civil Rights elites. Of course Strom Thurmond used Rustin’s role to paint the entire march as a communist front, and J. Edgar Hoover rejected a report showing no significant communist infiltration into the Civil Rights Movement, but this was just standard fare from the white supremacist American power structure.
The NAACP and most importantly Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference agreed to the idea, while the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were happy to use the opportunity to take on Kennedy publicly and directly for his inaction. The Civil Rights Movement was a diverse movement with a lot of different groups and aims. That meant some careful alliance building was needed. But the different groups did come up with specific goals to fight for which included not only the passage of Civil Rights legislation, but a $2 minimum wage ($20.47 today), federal employment law banning discrimination in public or private hiring, and the expansion of the Fair Labor Standards Act to include agricultural workers, domestic workers, and the rest of the workers excluded when the law passed in 1938.
During the March itself, Bayard Rustin read all these demands on live television, which may be the only time a list of labor demands has received that kind of coverage. A. Philip Randolph led off the speeches by saying, “We are the advanced guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom” and that “the sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of a human personality” in arguing for housing reform.
Playing a key role in the March on Washington was United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther. Organized labor often has a bad reputation on Civil Rights during this era, mostly for a good reason. Reuther is an important exception. This doesn’t mean he could instantly turn UAW locals into beacons of racial harmony. Turns out that racial solidarity has a lot more power with a lot more people than class solidarity, and UAW officials found that out the hard way when they tried to push Civil Rights on the shop floor. But that’s an issue for another entry in this series.
Reuther provided key labor support for the event. The AFL-CIO paid for a lot of the infrastructure of making this event happen, including the buses to get people to Washington, and the UAW paid for the sound system that would blast King’s speech into history. This all happened over the opposition of AFL-CIO head George Meany, who did not care much about Civil Rights before this and who opposed an official federation endorsement of the March. But the AFL-CIO did officially support the Kennedy Civil Rights bill. It is said that Meany however was so moved by Randolph’s speech at the March that he created the A. Philip Randolph Institute to promote African-Americans in the labor movement.
Reuther stated in his speech, “And the job question is crucial because we will not solve education or housing or public accommodations as long as millions of American Negroes are treated as second-class economic citizens and denied jobs.” Reuther knew that he had a friend in King because even as a lot of internationals and locals resisted the Civil Rights Movement, King consistently supported the progressive causes of labor and frequently spoke to labor audiences. And of course as King went on, he became more and more focused on economic justice as a centerpiece of the larger freedom struggle, to the point of dying while supporting the Memphis sanitation workers strike in 1968.
While it’s difficult to measure the precise impact of the March on the political process so soon before Kennedy’s death, we can pretty clearly say it led to the inclusion of the Fair Employment Practices clause into what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Also please notice how little a role Martin Luther King Jr. has played in this post. The March on Washington was not all about MLK, although that in no ways diminishes his importance to the movement or the “I Have a Dream” speech. But it was a lot more than one man giving one speech.
Maybe we should remember the real history of the March on Washington instead of a fake one.
FURTHER READING:
William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of the Civil Rights Movement
Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality
Michael Honey, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice
David Lewis Coleman, Race Against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit
(The preceding links give a small commission to Wonkette.)
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Totally OT, but when I saw in person the MLK sculpture in DC, having been carved into the white stone, it had a look of those at the counter in the Billy Jack movie who were pelted with flour.
"Like with most issues concerning minorities, FDR didn’t really care ..."
I quite appreciate these articles, but this is a rather artless and glib summary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's record on race -- and it happens to be, in the specifics of the case, spectacularly inaccurate.
FDR comes in for major criticism for the forced incarceration of Japanese-Americans. His civil rights record is far from unblemished.
BUT, this article does a grave disservice to the readers of this website, and our posterity by spreading inaccuracies and through fatal omissions of relevant fact.
Chief among these: Absolutely no reference to Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802, "Prohibiting Racial Discrimination by Government Defense Contractors."
The link provided does mention EO 8802 -- but not before repeating the glib exaggeration that Franklin D. Roosevelt cared not at all about the status of nonwhite Americans. In the retelling at the link, FDR "caved" finally and issued an executive order that prohibited racial discrimination by government defense contractors.
It is lamentable that pressure had to be brought to bear. But pressure was, and it succeeded, and in fairly short order. This was no 100 years after Appomattox to see Jim Crow disassembled.
It was an intense few weeks in the early spring of 1941 as the "lights were going out across Europe," and as the people of China and Korea lived under the horrors of Japanese imperial occupation.
A fairer view would be that Roosevelt not only caved, he listened and reacted. Would the same crowd have gotten half of that from Herbert Hoover had he won in '32 or Alf Landon in '36? Surely not. Maybe Wendell Willkie would have after 1940, but "what-ifs" ("counter-factual propositions") are not properly the subject of rigorous historiography.
This is all very much *not* to say that FDR was a "man of his time" who must be understood in the "context of his time." FDR was very much *not* a man of his time -- he was an outlier, by a Duchess County mile.
FDR was a born-rich Democrat from a New York family of Southern sympathies, who, radicalized by the Progressive Era and inspired to complete the progressive work left undone after the failure of the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, was far, far more open to listening to -- and prioritizing -- the concerns of women, non-whites, non-Protestants, non-rich, non-management, non-Easterners than any person of power other than Abraham Lincoln since the founding of the Republic. FDR took the meeting. And he should get credit for it. The other White House residents, with perhaps the exceptions of Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, wouldn't have let them in the gate.
FDR was no saint, and has much to explain about his unequal treatment of Asians and Jews during his administrations.
But, the fact set we have shows, at the very least, that the conclusion that FDR had no interest in the welfare at all of Blacks, is just plain wrong.
The cause of labor, and the cause of dispassionate historiography without fear or favor, gains nothing at all -- is damaged -- by glib, overbroad generalizations of the type foisted upon an innocent reading public in the article above.