We Should Add Climate Change to the Civil Rights Agenda

BET, August 22, 2013
Environmental issues should be a part of the next wave of the movement.
By Phaedra Ellis Lamkins
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This week, tens of thousands of people from across America are streaming into the nation’s capital to observe the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington — and Green for All will be among them.
We’re marching against the recent attack on voting rights. We’re demanding justice in the face of Stand Your Ground laws and racial profiling. We’re marching to raise awareness on unemployment, poverty, gun violence, immigration and gay rights. And we are calling for action on climate change.
Chances are, when you think about civil rights, environmental issues aren’t on the radar screen. But stop and think about it. Remember Hurricane Katrina?
The hurricane that leveled New Orleans showed that severe weather in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color is a matter of life and death. The images from the storm are hard to forget: bodies floating in water for days and thousands of people stranded without shelter, waiting for help that was too slow to come.
It’s not difficult to see how injustice and inequality played out during Hurricane Katrina. Thousands of people were subjected to needless loss, suffering, even death — just because they didn’t have the resources to prepare and escape the storm.
What’s harder to see is the imminent threat that severe weather — occurring with increased frequency and voracity — poses to our communities. We should never again witness the kind of devastation and preventable suffering we saw during Katrina. That’s why we have to add climate change to our retooled list of what the civil rights movement stands for.
Climate change isn’t just an environmental issue; it’s about keeping our communities safe. It’s a matter of justice. Because when it comes to disasters — from extreme temperatures to storms like Katrina — people of color are consistently hit first and worst.
African-Americans living in L.A. are more than twice as likely to die in a heat wave as other residents in the city, thanks to an abundance of pavement and lack of shade, cars and air conditioning in neighborhoods with the fewest resources. Factor in a steady rise in temperature — last year was the hottest year on record in the U.S. — and we’re looking at an urgent problem.
Meanwhile, our communities are at the tip of the spear when it comes to pollution. Fumes from coal plants don’t just accelerate climate change — they cause asthma, heart disease and cancer, leading to 13,000 premature deaths a year. And people of color are once again most vulnerable; 68 percent of African-Americans live within 30 miles of a toxic coal plant. That might help explain why one out of six Black kids suffers from asthma, compared with one in ten nationwide.
But that’s not the only reason we should pay attention. Fighting global warming — the right way — will get us closer to achieving the dream Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about on that day in Washington 50 years ago.
The solutions to climate change won’t just make us safer and healthier — they are one of the best chances we’ve had in a long time to cultivate economic justice in our communities. Clean energy, green infrastructure and sustainable industries are already creating jobs and opportunity. There’s a clean tech boom unfolding right now that is on par with the tech boom that made Silicon Valley. And this time, we don’t want to miss the boat.
If we do this right, we can make sure the steps we take to fight pollution also build pathways into the middle class for folks who have been locked out and left behind. These green jobs are real — 3.1 million Americans already have them. And because they pay more (13 percent above the median wage) while requiring less formal education, they are exactly what’s needed to eradicate poverty in our communities.
We have work to do to make sure more people of color have access to the opportunities created by responding to climate change. But if we are successful, we will help create a world where our kids can breathe clean air and drink clean water; where we’re safe and resilient in the face of storms; where more of us share in the nation’s prosperity.
This is Dr. King’s dream reborn. And fighting climate change helps get us there.
So, even as we confront the pressing dangers and injustices that cry for an immediate response — like attacks on our right to vote or racial profiling — we can’t lose sight of the future. We need to respond to climate change today to ensure safe, healthy, prosperous lives for our kids tomorrow.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is CEO of Green for All, a national organization working to build an inclusive green economy.

Obama speech: “A More Perfect Union”

Politico Mojo, Aug. 28, 2013
By Lauren Williams
On March 18, 2008 in Philadelphia, then-Senator Barack Obama delivered a speech that is considered by many to be one of the greatest speeches on race in America’s history. Our own David Corn wrote that the speech, which Obama gave in response to the controversy surrounding his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was “unlike any delivered by a major political figure in modern American history.”
When Obama talks about race, he makes waves (see his surprise press conference after the Zimmerman verdict for a more recent example). Wednesday, when he delivers a speech on the National Mall to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, he’s expected to speak about race again. As a reminder of how good he can be when he does, watch 2008’s “A More Perfect Union:”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zrp-v2tHaDo]

What Happened to Jobs and Justice?

N.Y. Times, Aug. 28, 2013
By William P. Jones
Madison, Wis. — On Aug. 28, 1963, nearly a quarter of a million people thronged the nation’s capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the largest civil rights demonstration in American history. Its impact on American politics was tremendous: in addition to building support to pass the civil rights bill that President John F. Kennedy had recently proposed, marchers succeeded in strengthening and expanding the scope of the bill far beyond what the president had envisioned.
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For many, the most important addition was Title VII, which prohibited employers and unions from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin and sex. The ban on sex discrimination was itself a further amendment, introduced in January 1964 by Southern Democrats who hoped it would impede the bill’s progress through Congress. Their plan backfired: not only did they fail to scuttle the bill, but their amendment also provided a critical legal tool in the fight for women’s equality.
The message of the march still resonated in 1965, when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, key features of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s proposal to bring “an end to poverty and racial injustice.”
The march was so successful that we often forget that it occurred in a political environment not so different from our own. Kennedy’s victory over Richard M. Nixon in 1960 signaled a break from the conservatism of the 1950s. But like the election of Barack Obama in 2008, hope for a return to the liberalism of the 1930s was dampened by an administration that rejected “old slogans” like wage increases and public works in favor of tax cuts and free trade to stimulate growth.
That disillusionment gave rise to sit-ins and freedom rides against segregation in the South, but those protests proved powerless in the face of entrenched conservative power. In contrast, the grass-roots movements that gained political influence in the Kennedy years were White Citizens Councils, the John Birch Society and other forces that, much like today’s Tea Party movement, shifted the political spectrum to the right.
Given those obstacles, how did the March on Washington help drive support for such sweeping civil rights and domestic policy measures?
First, it linked the protest movements of the 1960s to institutions with longstanding roots in working-class communities. The initial call for the 1963 demonstration came from the Negro American Labor Council, an organization of black trade unionists that used local networks to plan for the march months before it was officially announced.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee played similar roles in the South, mobilizing local civil rights groups, black churches and students. Support also came from the National Council of Negro Women and other elements of the black women’s movement that had battled poverty and discrimination since the 19th century.
At the same time, organizers rallied supporters around a broad and ambitious set of demands. A. Philip Randolph, the veteran trade unionist who had first called for a march on Washington to protest employment discrimination in 1941, wanted the demonstration to focus on the shortcomings of Kennedy’s economic policies. Pointing out that black workers were restricted to entry-level jobs that were most vulnerable to the automation and offshoring of manufacturing under way in the 1960s, he warned that without measures to end discrimination and create more jobs, blacks would be condemned to struggling for survival “within the grey shadows of a hopeless hope.”
Other black leaders shared that concern, but some worried that a “march for jobs” would compete with the movement that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others were leading against legalized discrimination and disfranchisement. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a prominent leader of the black women’s movement, persuaded the men to plan a demonstration that would address “both the economic problems and civil rights.”
Finally, while Randolph, King, Hedgeman and others expanded the mobilization to include a broad and multiracial coalition, they resisted pressure to moderate their tactics or demands.
Both black and white liberals worried that an angry protest would turn moderates in Congress against Kennedy’s civil rights bill, but Randolph and King convinced the leaders of the N.A.A.C.P., the United Auto Workers and the National Urban League that the demonstration would be peaceful and effective.
It was the combination of these stalwart positions and rich institutional networks with the sheer number of peaceful black and white marchers that persuaded so many Americans of the rightness of civil rights and antipoverty legislation.
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the march, however, its central achievements are more imperiled than ever. This summer the Supreme Court upheld the principles behind the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act while severely weakening authority to enforce them. We have a charismatic liberal president and inspiring protest movements dedicated to racial equality and economic justice — but, as in the Kennedy years, they have proved no match for well-organized conservatives.
The solution may not be another march on Washington. But real changes in policy, and the defense of previous victories, require the combination of institutional backing, coalition building and ambitious demands that brought so many people to the National Mall in 1963.
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William P. Jones is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and the author of “The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights.”

The Forgotten Martin Luther King: A Radical Anti-War Leftist

The Atlantic, Aug. 28, 2013
The great leader is not the safe-for-all-political stripes hero he is sometimes portrayed as — and it’s hard to imagine even President Obama fully embracing him.
By Matt Berman
Martin Luther King Jr. was not just the safe-for-all-political-stripes civil-rights activist he is often portrayed as today. He was never just the “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered 50 years ago Wednesday. He was an anti-war, anti-materialist activist whose views on American power would shock many of the same politicians who are currently scrambling to sing his praises.
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King’s more radical worldview came out clearly in a speech to an overflow crowd of more than 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967. “The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: ‘A time comes when silence is betrayal,'” he began. It wasn’t about the civil-rights movement — not directly, at least. “That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”
He continued, in a speech called “Beyond Vietnam“:

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF [National Liberation Front] but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents…. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

King also addressed the idea that his advocacy of nonviolence at home should extend to the rest of the world:

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.

Martin Luther King Jr. is being hailed by politicians of all stripes on Wednesday, from a president who is considering military options in Syria to Republicans like Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli. Former Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., wrote an op-ed for U.S. News and World Report on Wednesday, blaming “liberal progressive Democrats” and abortion for blocking King’s vision of equality from becoming a reality. “Dr. King advocated we evaluate the content of one’s character,” West writes. “However, in 2008 Americans voted for someone as president based upon the color of his skin. In 2012, Americans used the same criteria and made the same choice.”

The man who said that his dream of equality was “deeply rooted in the American Dream” also believed the American government, with what he saw as its weapons testing in Vietnam, was on par with “the Germans [who] tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe.” In the same speech, King said that, if U.S. actions were to continue, “there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam.”
The radicalism of the 1967 speech didn’t just extend to Vietnam. King called for the U.S. to “undergo a radical revolution of values,” saying that “we must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society.” He continued:

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” he said.
The speech, and King’s stance on Vietnam more generally, were not particularly well received by major media outlets at the time. Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post wrote that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.” An April 7, 1963, a New York Times editorial titled “Dr. King’s Error” took a wider view:

By drawing [Vietnam and “Negro equality”] together, Dr. King has done a disservice to both. The moral issues in Vietnam are less clear-cut than he suggests; the political strategy of uniting the peace movement and the civil-rights movement could very well be disastrous for both causes ….
Dr. King can only antagonize opinion in this country instead of winning recruits to the peace movement by recklessly comparing American military methods to those of the Nazis testing “new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe.” The facts are harsh, but they do not justify such slander ….
As an individual, Dr. King has the right and even the moral obligation to explore the ethical implications of the war in Vietnam, but as one of the most respected leaders of the civil-rights movement he has an equally weighty obligation to direct that movement’s efforts in the most constructive and relevant way.

King explicitly addressed such questions in his April speech:

Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

As he himself said, King was always more than “I Have a Dream.” His other stances — from economic justice to Vietnam — are just more controversial. That doesn’t mean that, 50 years after his historic march, they deserve to be forgotten. The total spectrum of his beliefs may not be as easy as “let freedom ring,” but the full MLK was much larger than the safe-for-everyone caricature that is often presented today.

Martin Luther King’s Economic Dream: A Guaranteed Income for All Americans

The Atlantic, Aug. 28, 2013
The civil rights leader laid out his vision for fighting poverty in his final book.
By JORDAN WEISSMANN, AUG 28 2013
650_MLK_Full_Employment_Wikimedia
One of the more under-appreciated aspects of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy is that by the end of his career, he had fashioned himself into a crusader against poverty, not just among blacks, but all Americans. In the weeks leading to his assassination, the civil rights leader had been hard at work organizing a new march on Washington known as the “Poor People’s Campaign.” The goal was to erect a tent city on the National Mall, that, as Mark Engler described it for The Nation in 2010, would “dramatize the reality of joblessness and deprivation by bringing those excluded from the economy to the doorstep of the nation’s leaders.” He was killed before he could see the effort through.
So what, exactly, was King’s economic dream? In short, he wanted the government to eradicate poverty by providing every American a guaranteed, middle-class income — an idea that, while light-years beyond the realm of mainstream political conversation today, had actually come into vogue by the late 1960s.
To be crystal clear, a guaranteed income — or a universal basic income, as it’s sometimes called today — is not the same as a higher minimum wage. Instead, it’s a policy designed to make sure each American has a certain concrete sum of money to spend each year. One modern version of the policy would give every adult a tax credit that would essentially become a cash payment for families that don’t pay much tax. Conservative thinker Charles Murray has advocatedreplacing the whole welfare state by handing every grown American a full $10,000.
King had an even more expansive vision. He laid out the case for the guaranteed income in his final book, 1967’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Washington’s previous efforts to fight poverty, he concluded, had been “piecemeal and pygmy.” The government’s believed it could lift up the poor by attacking the root causes of their impoverishment one by one — by providing better housing, better education, and better support for families. But these efforts had been too small and too disorganized. Moreover, he wrote, “the programs of the past all have another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.”
It was time, he believed, for a more straightforward approach: the government needed to make sure every American had a reasonable income.
In part, King’s thinking seemed to stem from a sense that no matter how strongly the economy might grow, it would never eliminate poverty entirely, or provide jobs for all. As he put it:

We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.
[…]
The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available

Note, King was did not appear to be arguing that Washington should simply pay people not to work. Rather, he seemed to believe it was the government’s responsibility to create jobs for those left behind by the economy (from his language here, it’s not hard to imagine he might even have supported a work requirement, in some circumstances), but above all else, to ensure a basic standard of living.
More than basic, actually. King argued that the guaranteed income be “pegged to the median of society,” and rise automatically along with the U.S. standard of living. “To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions,” wrote. Was it feasible? Maybe. He noted an estimate by John Kenneth Galbraith that the government could create a generous guaranteed income with $20 billion, which, as the economist put it, “not much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by ‘experts’ in Vietnam.”
As practical economics, ensuring every single American a middle class living through government redistribution and work programs seems a bit fanciful. The closest such an idea ever really came to fruition, meanwhile, was President Nixon’s proposed Family Assistance Plan, which would have ended welfare and instead guaranteed families of four $1,600 a year, at a time when the median household income was about $7,400.
But as a statement of values, King’s notion is still powerful. So with that in mind, I’ll leave you with man’s own words.

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

N.J. State Police failing to catch too many mistakes by troopers on the road, watchdog report says

“The professional standards office also raised red flags about statistics showing troopers used police dogs disproportionately on black motorists, a trend that ‘has increased steadily for the last two reporting periods.’”
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NJ.com, Aug. 25, 2013
By Christopher Baxter
TRENTON — Troopers patrolling New Jersey’s highways are breaking State Police rules at a “troubling” rate, and supervisors are not doing enough to catch the mistakes and fix them, according to a new report by the state Attorney General’s Office.
The report, which covered the first half of 2012, found the State Police failed to identify mistakes by troopers ranging from excessive force to improper vehicle searches in nearly a third of the 155 stops they were required to examine.
That shortcoming was made worse by the fact that the Attorney General’s Office recently allowed State Police supervisors to review fewer stops overall, with the caveat that they do a thorough job analyzing them.
“This is a very disturbing report,” said Samuel Walker, a national expert on police reforms who consulted for the federal government during its oversight of the State Police. “By the time you reach 30 percent, that’s getting pretty serious.”
The report also cited the State Police for using police dogs on a disproportionate number of black drivers, for not issuing Miranda warnings to suspects and for failing to properly activate and store recordings from patrol car cameras.
The findings were released online last month by the Office of Law Enforcement Professional Standards, which was created to ensure the State Police followed its own rules after federal authorities stopped monitoring the division in 2009.
The sampling of traffic stops reviewed by State Police and the professional standards office were only a fraction of the more than 400,000 made by troopers each year, and the division’s examination is designed only to suggest areas of misconduct or improper procedures that need attention.
Though the report said the majority of troopers play by the rules, it noted a “troubling trend of increasing numbers of errors made during motor vehicle stops” even though the office repeatedly raised concerns about the problems over the past several years.
“The fact that OLEPS was able to note 46 stops with an error not caught out of the stops that the State Police did review, is troubling,” according to the report. “The State Police need to employ more detailed reviews and properly note all errors.”
Leland Moore, a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office, which oversees the State Police as well as the professional standards office, said in a statement the majority of the report’s concerns could be addressed with better training.
“The State Police continues to do an excellent job of protecting New Jersey citizens while ensuring overall, continued compliance with the various monitoring standards and criteria,” Moore said.He also said disagreements over troopers’ use of force were in part due to differences in interpretation.
A spokesman for the State Police, Lt. Stephen Jones, said the division will act in response to the report, but gave no specific examples of what was being done to eliminate the problems identified.
“The OLEPS report is not the end of the review process,” Jones said. “We answer those findings and refine our processes based on them. It’s the checks and balances designed in this system that allow for improvement.”
He added that the office has “unfettered access” to the State Police.
“Their job is finding areas for improvement, and ours is making those improvements,” he said.
Use of force
Among the problems, the oversight report said, were three instances in which troopers used force against motorists. The State Police reviewed the incidents and said the force was appropriate, but the office disagreed and investigations were opened.
The report said the office was unable to determine if force used in four other instances was appropriate because they took place outside the view of dashboard cameras mounted in the trooper patrol cars on the scene.
Dashboard recordings continued to be a problem, the report said, because many cruisers had incomplete audio or video. The office was unable to examine 51 stops — about 15 percent of those reviewed — because of “missing or unavailable” recordings.
The recordings, which were required as part of federal oversight, are critical to defend troopers from false claims in court and to protect the public from trooper misconduct such as excessive force.
The professional standards office also raised red flags about statistics showing troopers used police dogs disproportionately on black motorists, a trend that “has increased steadily for the last two reporting periods.”
“White drivers made up 48 percent of all stops, yet only 30 percent of motor vehicle stops with canine deployments,” the report said. “Black drivers made up 39 percent of all stops and 61 percent of canine deployments.”
The report stopped short of accusing troopers of bias, and noted all the canine deployments were appropriate.
Miranda violations
The report also sounded an alarm about the 49 instances in which troopers made an arrest but failed to inform suspects of their Miranda rights, which can lead to lawsuits against the state and increased legal costs for taxpayers.
“Not only are these violations occurring in stops without supervisory review, they are occurring in stops with supervisory review and not being noted or leading to interventions,” the report said.
The problem with Miranda warnings dates to a 2009 state Supreme Court ruling that tightened standards for vehicle searches. But despite subsequent training for troopers on the new rules, the problem persists, the report said.
“The State Police may want to conduct random reviews of stops with arrests to determine the extent of the Miranda issue,” the report said.
‘Considerable progress’
Wayne Fisher, a professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, said that while it may seem the State Police are making a lot of mistakes, many of the problems are related to paperwork or other things that should not raise much alarm.
“There are some shortcomings in some specific areas, but I think taken in total, this report is further evidence that the State Police have made considerable progress,” Fisher said.
But Alex Shalom, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, said the true test of the professional standards office will be if it has the will and ability to force the State Police to improve.
“In any police department, you’re going to see failings by troopers,” said Shalom. “The question is, what are supervisors doing to remedy it? This report suggests they’re not doing enough.”

How Black Unionists Organized the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom

Labor Notes, Aug. 22, 2013
This summer marks 50 years since 1963’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew more than 200,000 people. But after the latest one-two punch—George Zimmerman walking free after killing Trayvon Martin, and the Supreme Court rolling back the Voting Rights Act—the new March on Washington August 24 is clearly needed to renew the struggle. (Get on board here.)
A fascinating new book from historian William P. Jones puts the 1963 action in its organizing context. Every U.S. school child learns the opening words of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but how many are taught that the march was the brainchild of the nation’s leading black labor activists—and called not only for an end to prejudice, but also for a federal jobs program, equality at work, and a boost to the minimum wage?
Black unionists organized through the 1950s against discrimination in hiring, on the job, and in unions. After a 1959 convention vote reaffirmed that the AFL-CIO would tolerate segregated locals, A. Philip Randolph (the “dean” of black unionists and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) and others founded the Negro American Labor Council to organize black workers.
Randolph predicted, if racist trends persisted in unions and apprenticeships, a “forgotten slum proletariat in the black ghettoes of the great metropolitan centers of the country, existing within the grey shadows of a hopeless hope.”
At the NALC’s 1960 founding convention, women unionists protested an all-male board and won two seats. Local chapters sprang up across the country, and the group kept pressing the AFL-CIO to tackle both civil rights and black workers’ access to better jobs. —Eds.
By William P. Jones
In January 1963 A. Philip Randolph asked his old friend Bayard Rustin, who was working for the left-wing War Resisters League, to prepare a proposal that could win support from civil rights and labor leaders for a “mass descent” on the nation’s capital….
Rustin delivered a three-page memorandum outlining an ambitious campaign to draw attention to “the economic subordination of the Negro,” create “more jobs for all Americans,” and advance a “broad and fundamental program for economic justice.”
Their plan centered on a massive lobbying campaign, in which 100,000 people would shut down Congress for one day while presenting legislators and the president with their legislative demands, followed the next day by a “mass protest rally.”
Randolph liked the idea, and the NALC vice presidents approved it on March 23. By then the plan had expanded to include a mass march from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, where they hoped that President Kennedy would address the crowd….
Although southern activists [such as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s SCLC and the student group SNCC] had been focused on campaigns in Alabama and Mississippi, their attention shifted to Washington after the Kennedy administration refused to intervene against flagrant violations of federal authority in the South….
King scolded the administration for allowing Alabama governor George Wallace to defy a federal court order requiring him to admit three black students to the state university.
KING JOINS
“In his broadest attack to date on President Kennedy’s civil rights record,” the New York Times reported, King warned that the SCLC and other groups were prepared to organize “a march on Washington, even sit-ins in Congress” to force the federal government into action.
Recognizing an opportunity to coordinate with the southern movement, Anna Arnold Hedgeman set up a meeting where Randolph and King resolved to march under the slogan “For Jobs and Freedom.” They soon won support from John Lewis, who had been elected chairman of SNCC, as well as James Farmer of CORE [Congress of Racial Equality]….
Recognizing that the March on Washington would take place even without their participation, and assured that the demonstration would be as peaceful and orderly as the June 23, 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League finally came on board.
With leaders of the NALC, SCLC, CORE, and SNCC, they met in New York on July 2 and pledged to mobilize local chapters of their respective organizations to bring their membership to Washington on August 28, the eighth anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder.
100,000 FOR $65,000
Bayard Rustin presented a detailed set of demands for the demonstration, including a federal jobs creation program, raising the minimum wage, a Fair Employment Practice law, and support for Kennedy’s civil rights bill. He anticipated that they could get 100,000 people to participate and estimated that the event would cost $65,000….
Historians have marveled at Rustin’s ability to build the march “out of nothing” in less than two months, but that assessment overlooks the rich organizational networks that he built upon.
Cleveland Robinson and L. Joseph Overton [both of District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union] asked trade unionists to establish local organizing committees in cities where they had influence, and CORE’s Norman Hill spent July and August travelling across the country to coordinate their efforts.
Roy Wilkins wrote to every NAACP branch, youth council, and state conference asking them to organize “no less than 100,000” people to participate in the March, and he dispatched NAACP labor secretary Herbert Hill to help them do that.
Anna Hedgeman was charged with reaching out to religious groups. She took particular pride in recruiting white Christians from the South who “feel concern but have all too little opportunity to express it in their home place,” stating that the March would give them a chance to meet “white allies” from other regions while also demonstrating that African Americans were not completely alone in the South.
She also convinced the National Council of Churches to hold its annual convention in Washington the week of August 28 and encourage its 80,000 members to attend the March….
The American Jewish Congress and the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice endorsed the March on Washington, along with 17 international unions, several state and municipal labor councils, and the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO.
By the end of July, Rustin reported that local organizing committees had chartered 2,000 buses, 21 trains, and 10 airplanes—enough to carry 115,000 marchers to Washington.
AFL-CIO SITS IT OUT
The one major liberal body that rebuffed Randolph’s request for support was George Meany’s AFL-CIO, but by that point the March was clearly prepared to move forward without it.
Randolph and UAW President Walter Reuther pushed for the endorsement at a meeting of the executive council just two weeks before the March, but met resistance from union leaders who feared “that there would be disorder, that people would get hurt, and that it would build up resentment in Congress.”
Some pushed for outright rejection of the March, but President George Meany negotiated a compromise that expressed support for its goals and allowed affiliated unions to participate but withheld an official endorsement from the federation itself.
Excerpted from The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights, by William P. Jones. Copyright © 2013 by William P. Jones. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

50 Years Later

N.Y. Times, Aug.23, 2013
By Charles M. Blow
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, I have a gnawing in my gut, an uneasy sense of society and its racial reality.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech keeps ringing in my head, an aching, idyllic, rhetorical masterpiece that envisions a future free of discrimination and filled with harmony and equality. But I wonder whether the day he imagined will ever come and whether many Americans have quietly abandoned King’s dream as a vision that can’t — or shouldn’t — exist in reality.
I’m absolutely convinced that enormous steps have been made in race relations. That’s not debatable. Most laws that explicitly codified discrimination have been stricken from the books. Overt, articulated racial animus has become more socially unacceptable. And diversity has become a cause to be championed in many quarters, even if efforts to achieve it have taken some hits of late.
But my worry is that we have hit a ceiling of sorts. As we get closer to a society where explicit bias is virtually eradicated, we no longer have the stomach to deal with the more sinister issues of implicit biases and of structural and systematic racial inequality.
I worry that centuries of majority privilege and minority disenfranchisement are being overlooked in puddle-deep discussions about race and inequality, personal responsibility and societal inhibitors.
I wonder if we, as a society of increasing diversity but also drastic inequality, even agree on what constitutes equality. When we hear that word, do we think of equal opportunity, or equal treatment under the law, or equal outcomes, or some combination of those factors?
And I worry that there is a distinct and ever-more-vocal weariness — and in some cases, outright hostility — about the continued focus on racial equality.
In this topsy-turvy world, those who even deign to raise the issue of racial inequality can be quickly dismissed as race-baiters or, worse, as actual racists. It’s the willful-ignorance-is-bliss approach to dismissing undesirable discussion.
In this moment, blacks and whites see the racial progress so differently that it feels as if we are living in two separate Americas.
According to a Pew Research Center poll released Thursday, nearly twice as many blacks as whites say that blacks are treated less fairly by the police. More than twice as many blacks as whites say that blacks are treated less fairly by the courts. And about three times as many blacks as whites say that blacks are treated less fairly than whites at work, in stores or restaurants, in public schools and by the health care system.
In fact, a 2011 study by researchers at Tufts University and Harvard Business School found, “Whites believe that they have replaced blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America.”
And in these divergent realities, we appear to be resegregating — moving in the opposite direction of King’s dream.
The Great Migration — in which millions of African-Americans in the 20th century, in two waves, left the rural South for big cities in the North, Midwest and West Coast — seems to have become a failed experiment, with many blacks reversing those migratory patterns and either moving back to the South or out of the cities.
As USA Today reported in 2011:
“2010 census data released so far this year show that 20 of the 25 cities that have at least 250,000 people and a 20 percent black population either lost more blacks or gained fewer in the past decade than during the 1990s. The declines happened in some traditional black strongholds: Chicago, Oakland, Atlanta, Cleveland and St. Louis.”
In addition, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released this month found that “about 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of nonwhite Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race.”
Furthermore, there is some evidence that our schools are becoming more segregated, not less. A study this year by Dana Thompson Dorsey of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that “students are more racially segregated in schools today than they were in the late 1960s and prior to the enforcement of court-ordered desegregation in school districts across the country.”
I want to celebrate our progress, but I’m too disturbed by the setbacks.
I had hoped to write a hopeful, uplifting column to mark this anniversary. I wanted to be happily lost in The Dream. Instead, I must face this dawning reality.