This Day in Labor History: August 28, 1963. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom takes place in Washington, DC. Let's talk about how economic issues are completely erased from our public memory of civil rights and how challenging employers was central to the movement. 
First, 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 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 organized it. Rustin had been a communist in the past and that greatly worried anti-communists like the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, but he had played a role in the planning for the 1941 march and he had Randolph’s trust.
Fun fact about Wilkins: when WEB DuBois died shortly before the March, Wilkins opposed any mention of him there because DuBois had become a communist.
Of course Strom Thurmond used Rustin’s role to paint the 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 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 they came up with an agenda they could agree on to demand at the march.
One of the major demands of the March: a $2 minimum wage. What is that in today's money? Nearly $16!!! Yes, the March on Washington was also the Fight for $15.
Other economic justice demands were 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 in American history 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.
We could use a lot more leaders saying that private property rights are not as important as human rights.
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 Reuther could 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.
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 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.
Also please notice how little a role Martin Luther King has played in this. 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.
So why is this all forgotten about? Why don't we remember the economic justice part of the Civil Rights Movement? There are many reasons. Of course, white racists are a big part of it. But don't look past the black elite, many of whom would also like you to forget it.
In 1977, after electing Maynard Jackson mayor of Atlanta, black workers with AFSCME found themselves under direct attack from Jackson for demanding economic justice. Almost the whole civil rights establishment backed Jackson and accused the union of serving white interests.
This was all because black workers had organized for basic decency. But Jackson, like too much of the former civil rights elite, had aligned with capitalists by the late 1970s.
So yes, of course we need to blame racists and conservatives for the erasure of economic justice from how we remember the March on Washington and the civil rights movement, but there are lots of people to blame on top of them.
We need to reclaim the economic justice heritage of the March on Washington by challenging anyone who does not support a $15 minimum wage and other progressive necessities for all workers. And we need to push back on false narratives of the Civil Rights Movement.
Back on Sunday to talk about white workers and anti-Chinese violence in the 1880s.
