1A MARCH FOR JOBS
Bayard Rustin was feeling out of sorts, and the dreary weather on that December day in 1962 didn’t help. Temperatures ranged in the single digits, dirty snow covered the ground, and an icy wind blasted through the streets.
Wearing his crumpled overcoat, Rustin dashed down the subway steps and hopped on the train to Harlem. He was glad to be out of the bitter cold, but he still felt ill at ease, as if he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yes, he liked his job as executive director of the War Resisters League, and he loved his Manhattan apartment. But deep down, the fifty-year-old Rustin wanted to do something else, to be somewhere else.
What he desperately wanted—but couldn’t have, at least right now—was the chance to return to the epicenter of the civil rights movement.
Between 1955 and 1960, Rustin was a close adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., teaching him about nonviolence, helping him develop tactics to overcome segregation, and writing some of his articles and speeches.
But all that came to a halt when Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., threatened to tell the media that King and Rustin were lovers. It was a bald-faced lie. Rustin was gay, King was straight, and the two were not a couple.
But King worried. What would happen if the press published the false story? Would it hurt his reputation? Would it undermine the civil rights movement? King asked himself these questions because he knew that many people in 1960 saw gay men as psychologically sick, criminal, and immoral.
King was so terrified of potential damage that he cut Rustin out of his inner circle. The brutal act devastated Rustin, and ever since then, he had not quite found his footing.
* * *
Rustin stepped off the train in central Harlem and headed to the office of his beloved mentor, A. Philip Randolph, the only civil rights leader who had stood by his side for the past two years.
Randolph was well-known to Black people across the country. In 1925, he had founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s largest all-Black labor union, to secure better wages and working conditions for train workers. His efforts paid off, and he was hailed as a hero.
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded by Randolph in 1925, quickly became the most powerful Black labor union in the nation.
Then, fifteen years later, shortly before the United States entered World War II, the labor leader acquired legendary status by squaring off against President Franklin Roosevelt.
* * *
On September 27, 1940—with the war raging in Europe and Asia and America’s involvement seeming possible—Randolph and two other Black leaders traveled to the White House. Their mission was to urge the president to desegregate the military and defense industries—the research facilities and factories that produced rifles, tanks, ships, and other war-related items.
Roosevelt “promised to look into possible methods of lessening, if not destroying, discrimination against Negroes.” But just two weeks later, the president’s press secretary issued a statement that reaffirmed racial segregation in the military. Equally troubling, there was no statement about desegregating defense industries.
Randolph was furious. But rather than seeking another Oval Office meeting, he came up with a radical idea—an all-Black march on Washington! The labor leader shared his idea in an article published in Black newspapers across the country.
“I suggest,” he wrote, “that 10,000 Negroes march on Washington, D.C., the capital of the nation, with the slogan: WE LOYAL NEGRO- AMERICAN CITIZENS DEMAND THE RIGHT TO WORK AND FIGHT FOR OUR COUNTRY.”
The march would “wake up and shock the nation’s political leaders,” he added. “Nobody expects 10,000 Negroes to get together and march anywhere for anything at any time. Negroes … are supposed to be just scared and unorganizable.”
A promotional flyer for the 1941 march promises “a silent, dignified, determined” protest
Twenty-nine-year-old Bayard Rustin was so excited by his mentor’s idea that he worked full-time on recruitment. Randolph soon predicted that marchers would number not ten thousand but a hundred thousand.
Roosevelt surrendered.
On June 25, 1941, six days before the march, the president signed Executive Order 8802, which declared: “There shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries and in Government, because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”
Roosevelt’s historic order marked the first time that a threatened Black protest resulted in federal action benefiting Black lives.
The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most important Black newspapers, celebrated the order as a “great forward step toward true national unity.”
Randolph was delighted, and though he had not achieved the desegregation of the armed forces, he called off the march.
* * *
Twenty-one years later, the idea of a march was back. Now seventy-three years old, Randolph welcomed Rustin in from the cold. Both men looked forward to these regular chats about racial justice, especially since they were no longer front and center in the civil rights movement.
A. Philip Randolph, November 1942
White House file copy of Eleanor Roosevelt’s June 1941 letter to A. Philip Randolph. The first lady supported racial equality, but she also opposed the 1941 march. Like many others, she believed that the march might provoke violence and create backlash in congress. Randolph would hear the same criticism when planning the 1963 march.
As Rustin took off his overcoat, Randolph settled into his high-backed leather chair. He spoke in a clipped, sophisticated accent, and while he sounded like royalty, he always took aim at inequality and injustice.
This time Randolph focused on “the biggest crisis currently facing the American Negro”—racial discrimination in employment. He was especially upset that white factory owners were replacing Black workers with machines.
The federal government must step in, Randolph asserted.
* * *
Randolph and Rustin were fervent socialists.
They believed that the government had a moral obligation to steer the nation’s economy so that the basic needs of all people—food, shelter, education, and health care—would be met at every point in their lives. In the field of employment, for example, the government should train displaced workers, create jobs for all the unemployed, and make employers pay decent wages.
As Black socialists, Randolph and Rustin also believed that the government should punish businesses, industries, and labor unions that discriminated against Black people.
And as experienced socialists, they knew that the government would intervene in the economy only if forced to do so by a powerful social movement, like the March on Washington Movement in 1941.
CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM
Capitalists believe in the right to private property. Socialists call for some property, like factories, to be held in common, by the government or associations of workers. Capitalists say that the economy operates best when the government doesn’t interfere with it. Socialists urge the government to build an economy that serves everyone’s basic needs. Capitalists argue that business and industry owners can best serve society by earning profits. Socialists claim that the pursuit of profit alone creates an unequal society where rich people rule over poor people.
SPA logo, from a 1915 brochure
Randolph had an idea.
Let’s march on Washington for jobs! We’ve been talking about this for more than twenty years. Let’s finally do it!
Rustin lit up.
Yes! And get the entire civil rights movement to join us!
For Randolph and Rustin, it wasn’t good enough for the movement to focus on desegregating trains and buses, water fountains and restrooms, stores and restaurants.
After all, what good is it to sit in a desegregated restaurant if you don’t have money to buy a hamburger?
If the movement wanted total freedom, it had to fight for massive changes to an economy that discriminated against Black people. It had to fight for jobs!
Randolph lit up, too.
Bayard, we can win this!
Remembering his 1941 victory, Randolph was confident that the movement could indeed win this new fight exactly because it had the most important ingredient for any political battle—people!
* * *
But first things first.
Randolph asked Rustin if he’d put together a short proposal for a march that would take place the following year, in 1963, to mark the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and protest the nation’s ongoing resistance to Black freedom.
Thrilled beyond measure, Rustin couldn’t agree fast enough.
Grabbing his overcoat, he headed back into the cold air, his long chin leading the way, trusting that the brutal December winds were no match for the winds of change about to sweep across the nation.
The plans for a new march on Washington were underway.
WHY WAIT SO LONG TO ORGANIZE THE MARCH?
Although plans for a Washington march for jobs crystallized in December 1962, Randolph had spoken of the idea at least ten months earlier. If Black unemployment was “becoming a real threat,” as Randolph said in a February 1962 interview, why do you think he waited so long to begin making concrete plans?
From its very first lines, the January 1963 march proposal builds a powerful argument.
2A MARCH FOR JOBS—AND FREEDOM
Tom Kahn, a young white socialist, typed furiously, almost as fast as the ideas ricocheted around Bayard Rustin’s cramped apartment. Jobs for everyone! Raise the minimum wage! More job training!
Norman Hill, a young Black socialist, chimed in with ideas about protests. Let’s have sit-ins! And shut down Congress!
It was a gathering in late December 1962 or early January 1963. The three friends exploded with creativity for hours, developing and improving and polishing the proposal that A. Philip Randolph had requested. The result of their human Big Bang was a radical scheme to force the government to reshape the economy.
The three-page proposal focused on economic injustice and government inaction as the most important problems facing Black Americans.
“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 trio wrote.
Compared to white workers, Black workers suffered from high unemployment rates, low wages, and little access to job training programs. But the problem of economic justice was also more than a Black issue, the trio noted. There simply weren’t enough good jobs for everyone.
The three friends called for “a two-day action program” that would demand “the emancipation of all labor” by “the creation of more jobs for all Americans.”
On the first day, “a mass descent on Congress” would “so flood all Congressmen with a staggered series of labor, church, civil rights delegations from their own states that they would be unable to conduct business on the floor of Congress for an entire day.” On the second day, “a mass protest rally” would take place at a location yet to be determined.
Copyright © 2023 by Yohuru Williams and Michael G. Long
