AP Photo
Attendees of the March on Washington gather around the Reflecting Pool near the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963.
This past weekend, both The New York Times and The Washington Post ran multipage feature stories commemorating the great March on Washington, which had taken place exactly 60 years ago. Both features took the form of interviews with the people who filled the space between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument to hear speeches from Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and A. Philip Randolph, among others, demanding an end to segregation, voting rights for African Americans, and an economy in which all Americans could prosper. The interviewees also included those who’d worked to organize and publicize the march, which was an event both long envisioned and yet without precedent.
The interviews in both papers were wonderful, providing a fairly clear picture of how the march’s organizers pulled it off, what the attendees experienced, and how it affected their lives and that of their nation.
But both totally skipped the politics from whence the March emerged. They neglected to note that every planner and organizer, and a number of the speakers—most particularly King—were lifelong democratic socialists.
As I noted when I wrote a Prospect feature on the march on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the man who conceived and called the march, Sleeping Car Porters union leader Randolph, had been a member of the Socialist Party since the 1910s. (Like the SP’s then-leader, Eugene V. Debs, Randolph had been imprisoned for opposing World War I, but unlike Debs, he only served a few days.) Randolph first conceived a March on Washington in 1941 to demand the desegregation of the armed forces and defense factories; he called it off when FDR agreed with that latter demand. He renewed his call in 1948, and again called it off when Harry Truman agreed to desegregate the armed forces.
Throughout the ’50s, Randolph’s lieutenant, Bayard Rustin, had organized smaller protests in Washington; one, in 1957, to demand voting rights for Southern Blacks, at which King spoke with the refrain of “Give us the ballot!” Rustin had briefly belonged to the Communist Party in the 1930s, but belonged to the Socialist Party thereafter. King was a democratic socialist as well; while he never publicized that for fear of weakening the civil rights movement, he didn’t shy from advocating social democratic economic reforms in a number of his speeches. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was one of the six civil rights groups that were the march’s core sponsors; the other one of the six, and the one that had initiated the more radical practice of “Freedom Rides,” was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), also headed by longtime SP member James Farmer.
Rustin’s lieutenants in organizing the march were young socialists—chiefly Rachelle Horowitz, the march’s transportation coordinator, who figured prominently in both of last weekend’s features—to whom a slightly older young socialist named Michael Harrington (later, the founder of both DSOC and DSA) had suggested they go to work with Rustin. The march’s key funder, the United Auto Workers, was suffused with secondary leadership and key national staffers who were SP members, while UAW President Walter Reuther, who spoke at the march, had been an SP member in the ’30s and retained much of those politics throughout his life.
All that said, at the time the march took place, the socialist movement was at the nadir of its institutional life. Nationally, the Socialist Party was down to a few thousand members; Communist Party membership had suffered major declines in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s 1956 speech, which belatedly revealed to the party’s true believers the crimes of Stalin; and the New Left was still confined to a handful of small groups. As Gary Dorrien documented in his book American Democratic Socialism (which I reviewed in the Spring 2022 issue of Dissent), the only real impact that American socialists had on their nation from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s was to jump-start the civil rights revolution.
Most mainstream accounts of that revolution overlook its socialist roots and substance, most particularly the socialist roots and substance of the great march, which was conceived in 1962 as a march to democratize the racist corporate economy of the North and then expanded to demand an end to Jim Crow in the South. Had credits been rolled at the march’s conclusion, they would have said: “Brought to you by your friendly neighborhood socialists.”
