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The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington
from Dissent magazine:
The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington
By William P. Jones - Spring 2013
[font size="1"]Bayard Rustin and Cleveland Robinson 3 weeks before the march (Orlando Fernandez, Wiki. Com.)[/font]
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which occurred fifty years ago this August 28, remains one of the most successful mobilizations ever created by the American Left. Organized by a coalition of trade unionists, civil rights activists, and feministsmost of them African American and nearly all of them socialiststhe protest drew nearly a quarter-million people to the nations capital. Composed primarily of factory workers, domestic servants, public employees, and farm workers, it was the largest demonstrationand, some argued, the largest gathering of union membersin the history of the United States.
That massive turnout set the stage not only for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which President John F. Kennedy had proposed two months before, but also for the addition to that law of a Fair Employment Practices clause, which prohibited employers, unions, and government officials from discriminating against workers on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or sex. And, by linking those egalitarian objectives to a broader agenda of ending poverty and reforming the economy, the protest also forged a political agenda that would inspire liberals and leftists ranging from President Lyndon Johnson to the Black Power movement. After watching organizer Bayard Rustin read the full list of demands, while every television camera at the disposal of the networks was upon him, left-wing journalist Murray Kempton remarked, No expression one-tenth so radical has ever been seen or heard by so many Americans.
Yet, despite that success, the Left has largely relinquished its claim to the legacy of the March on Washington. Even before it occurred, Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X leveled the chargeembraced by Black Power and New Left activists in the subsequent decadethat the mobilization had been taken over by the government and deprived of its once-radical agenda. Meanwhile, liberals and even conservatives were happy to claim the demonstration as their ownoften focusing narrowly on the relatively moderate and conciliatory message of Martin Luther King, Jr.s I Have a Dream speech while overlooking more confrontational statements by A. Philip Randolph, John Lewis, and others.
By the 1980s, a broad consensus had emerged that attributed the success of the protest not to its radicalism but to its narrow focus on, as journalist Juan Williams wrote for the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, moral imperatives that had garnered support from the nations moderatesissues such as the right to vote and the right to a decent education. While conservatives Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom congratulated Randolph, King, and others for suppressing demands for radical, social, political and economic changes, leftist Manning Marable chided civil rights leaders for failing to even grapple with (the) social and economic contradictions of American capitalism. Only in the late 1960s, according to Williams, did the movement expand its agenda to include issues whose moral rightness was not as readily apparent: job and housing discrimination, Johnsons war on poverty, and affirmative action. ............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-forgotten-radical-history-of-the-march-on-washington
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The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington (Original Post)
marmar
Apr 2013
OP
niyad
(112,435 posts)1. k and r
Thank you for the link.