Sixty years ago, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream turned the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom into a near-religious revival. King’s speech remains so emotionally powerful that we remember little else about that historic march and rally. That’s a shame, because the demonstration was so much more than a dream; it was also a socialist-inspired demand for economic justice.
The march’s radicalism hinged on its call for “a national minimum wage of not less than $2.00 per hour.” Accounting for inflation, that modest-sounding figure translates to more than $19 in today’s market. That’s $4 more than the Fight for $15 movement demands, $2 more than the $17 recently proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont. and $11.75 above the $7.25 federal minimum wage, which hasn’t budged since 2009.
Sanders remains a champion for the working class, but he’s clearly not keeping pace with his late comrades, especially the two main organizers of the March—A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.
In 1963, Randolph and Rustin, both democratic socialists, faulted the civil rights movement for focusing almost singularly on racial desegregation. Yes, desegregating public spaces was important, but if the movement wanted total freedom for Black Americans, it had to start fighting for jobs with decent wages.
The original plan for the march—as conceived by Randolph, Rustin, Tom Kahn, and Norman Hill—lambasted the federal government for its failure to help Black Americans achieve economic freedom. “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,” they lamented in an organizing document.
President John F. Kennedy, meanwhile, was unwilling to push for either a $2 national minimum wage or the other demand made by the organizers, a “massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers, Negro and white, on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.”
But Randolph would not relent, and on the day of the March, he delivered the opening salvo against Kennedy. “Yes, we want all public accommodations open to all citizens,” he said, “but those accommodations will mean little to those who cannot afford to use them.”
Randolph was not an electric speaker by any measure. His special gift was to sound dignified, even aristocratic, while shredding his opponents. And there were always more opponents to shred, like the capitalists who said that people should be free to run their own businesses as they saw fit, without government interference.
For Randolph, the “moral revolution” of August 28 was about toppling white-dominated capitalism and replacing it with a socialist economy that recognized human equality and guaranteed jobs with living wages. Equally important, Randolph strongly believed that Black Americans would be the leading revolutionaries precisely because they suffered most under capitalism. “It falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values [people over profits and property rights] because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property,” he explained.
Randolph had the support of other speakers that day, especially John Lewis, the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who demanded “a bill that will ensure the equality of a maid who earns $5.00 a week in a home of a family whose total income is $100,000 a year.”
At the end of the day, Randolph introduced Bayard Rustin to lead the people in affirming the demands of the march. “We demand that every person in this nation, Black or white, be given training and work with dignity to defeat unemployment and automation!” Rustin declared, raising his fist into the air.
Unfortunately, today’s political leaders will probably ignore those demands and merely extol King’s dream until the cows come home. Dreams, of course, are easier to deal with than concrete demands.
Perhaps we might start by mirroring the march and demanding a national minimum wage of $19 per hour. If we want workers to live with dignity, as Randolph and Rustin did, that figure seems like a reasonable starting point—unless, of course, we’re simply dreamers.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.