There was a March in Washington on Saturday, August 26, commemorating 60 years since the original March which has come to be defined by Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech. Now in fact, the reason the 1963 march was such a success (drawing a quarter of a million people with not a single act of violence) was because it was a result of a grand coalition of the southern based Civil Rights Movement with the National Labor Movement. Though the two men most responsible for the march were A. Philip Randolph the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Bayard Rustin (a gay pacifist organizer par excellence!), Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers, was another one of the main organizers. Thirty percent of the marchers were white and I’ll bet most of the adults among them were union members.
Over the next two years, Congress debated and passed two Civil Rights bills, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 1964 law outlawed discrimination in public accommodations and, more importantly, in employment. The 1965 law outlawed poll taxes and literacy tests and provided for federal examiners to determine the eligibility of voters ---- abolishing the ability of local voter registrars to keep black Americans from voting. Though the 1964 law was valuable in terms of personal rights, the voting rights act had dramatic impact.
Within a year, a quarter of a million new Black voters had been registered, one-third by federal examiners. By the end of 1966, only four out of 13 southern states had fewer than 50 percent of African Americans registered to vote.
In the Presidential election of 1964, President Johnson beat right-wing extremist Barry Goldwater in a landslide after Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights act earlier that year. (That election also marked the beginning of the departure of racist, segregationist Southern whites from the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. This was symbolized by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina publicly becoming a Republican and supporting Goldwater. Aside from Arizona, Goldwater only won states in the old Confederacy. – and not all of them.)
The reason the political demands of the marchers in 1963 succeeded is that a coalition including labor unions, civil rights activists and religious leaders made it politically possible for northern, midwestern and western politicians of both political parties to support the 1964 act. Once Johnson had cruised to a landslide re-election, it was easy for him to get support for the much more significant voting rights act.
[I think the best single volume book on the period around the passage of these two laws is Pillar of Fire, America in the King Years, 1963-65. This is the second volume in Taylor Branch’s magnificent detailed history of the Civil Rights struggles between the 1950s and 1968. (The other two volumes are Parting the Waters which covers the period from 1955 to 1963 and At Canaan’s Edge which covers the period from 1965 to 1968. All three were published by Simon and Shuster but are available in a variety of recent paperbacks – and probably on line.) In Pillar of Fire we learn how President John F. Kennedy was dragged kicking and screaming to introduce a Civil Rights bill in 1963 – basically “forced” by the courage of Civil Rights demonstrators in Birmingham and the outrage of the public at the violence visited upon demonstrators by Bull Connor’s thugs and dogs. Then Branch shows how Lyndon Johnson, upon taking over the Presidency, used all the skills he had learned when he had been Master of the Senate (itself an outstanding book about that phase of Johnson’s life written by Robert Caro) to push through the 1964 and 65 bills.]
To pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was essential that the Senate invoke cloture to end a Southern filibuster. In those days, that required 67 votes --- they actually got 71 --- including the votes of 27 Republicans. Minority Leader Everett Dirksen corralled the vast majority of his caucus --- only six Republicans voted against cloture. Among the Southern Democrats who voted against cloture and against the bill was South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond – soon to become a Republican. President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said that with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democrats had surrendered the South to the Republicans for at least a generation. (This story is probably false but telling!). In fact, Republican domination has lasted a number of generations after 1964 – though North Carolina and Georgia are not solid Republican these days. The voting rights act also required a cloture vote and they got 70 in support.
FAST FORWARD TO TODAY
On Saturday, August 26, a much smaller group (perhaps 60,000) marched in DC to commemorate that 1964 march and re-dedicate themselves to the ongoing struggle. The family of Dr. Martin Luther King had prominent roles in organizing and speaking at the rally. For me, the most dramatic speech was by King’s 15 year old granddaughter Yolanda. She said,
“Sixty years ago, my grandfather delivered his dream, his message, and that was a call to action. Sixty years later, the dream has not been fulfilled,”
She continued that if she could speak to her grandfather today, she would say, "I am sorry we still have to be here to rededicate ourselves to finishing your work."
"Sixty years ago, Dr. King urged us to struggle against the triple evils of racism, poverty and bigotry," she said. "Today, racism is still with us. Poverty is still with us. And now gun violence has come for our places of worship, our schools and our shopping centers."
[These quotes are from ABC news. The source is available here. ]
Two years earlier, Ms. King (at age 13 no less!) had addressed a similar demonstration in Washington and warned that
“ Racism is alive and well in our country. Here’s how I know: This year, 400 anti-voting bills have been snaking their way through states — and 30 have already been passed into law. Think about that: Lawmakers have passed 30 bills to stop people from voting. Thirty bills that silence the voices of Black and brown people, immigrants, and young voters. The worst of these bills make it illegal to give food and water to voters waiting in line and prevent people from having a say in the direction of our country.”
[These quotes are from “MLK Granddaughter, Yolanda King, Joins the March on Washington for Voting Rights,” available here.]
Ms. King is definitely right. The question is, why have the great victories of 1964 and 65 not been followed by more and more. Why is the mood at these anniversary commemorations full of worry and without exuberance. I think there is a big difference between the recent march and the one that occurred sixty years ago. And that difference is the nature of the opposition.
[For a very detailed historical overview that actually goes all the way back to the “counter-revolution” against Reconstruction that succeeded in re-establishing white supremacy in the South from the 1880s to 1965, see Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters From an American,” August 30, 2023. ]
In the 1950s and 60s, the opposition was confined to the South. White people in the rest of the country could attack the “backward” Southern racists who lynched black people while being secure that they didn’t have to sacrifice anything to support black rights in the South.
[The murderers of the Chicago teenager Emmett Till were acquitted by an all white jury and immediately sold their stories to Look Magazine in which they confessed! And that happened in 1955.]
Once the political leadership of the country decided they could afford to give the Southern racists the back of their hand, and white folks in the North could feel superior to their benighted Southern brethren without “sacrificing” anything, there was an easy political path to abolishing Jim Crow and giving black Americans the right to vote.
Beginning with the Goldwater campaign in 1964, the opposition painstakingly recreated itself. Abandoning the explicitly anti-black rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan, they began to build on white resentment at supposed advantages received by black people and white fear of the decline in Law and Order.
[The detailed analysis of the Kerner Report issued in 1969 which explained the root causes of black rebellions – called riots of course --- in 1967 and 68 was completely ignored, but they are pretty good even after over 50 years. See Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders available here. It was much easier to consider the rioters lawless hoodlums or dangerous revolutionaries and spend money beefing up police departments to suppress them.]
We saw white resentment on display when Dr. King led marches through Chicago suburbs in 1966 and had white suburbanites throwing stones at him. We saw the fear of crime and lawlessness in the positive responses to the Law and Order messages of both Richard Nixon and George Wallace in the 1968 Presidential election. (We also saw it in the gigantic increases in local police budgets, the creation of SWAT teams, the massive increase in incarceration, and I could go on and on.)
As the black population became more diverse --- with blacks achieving in politics, law, business, etc. it appeared that the United States was realizing Dr. King’s dream. There were black mayors and black members of Congress from the South for the first time since Reconstruction. There were black Supreme Court Justices. Blacks were Presidents of major Universities and heads of major corporations. There even was a black President of the United States. This permitted too many Americans to believe there had been ENOUGH progress. It also caused many white Americans to fear they were being “replaced” in the hierarchy of opportunity.
(And let us not forget the explosion of opportunities for women --- a very positive side effect of the 1964 law’s outlawing of employment discrimination. Challenging male privilege was another jolt to the self-esteem of too many men – who saw the rise of women’s rights and gay rights as threatening as well.)
And as all this progress was being made, the resentment coalition built until with the election of Donald Trump it came out of the shadows and took over the Republican Party. Thus, it is an unfortunate fact that the march on Saturday, August 26 was playing defense against this resentment coalition.
I am hopeful that enough people in the country have looked over the abyss at what Trumpism will mean should it triumph and recoiled in horror. Let us hope the march signals a recreation of that grand coalition from 1963.
Michael Meeropol is professor emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. He is the author with Howard and Paul Sherman of the recently published second edition of Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies
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