After equality of opportunity
King’s call for a multiracial coalition seeking economic justice
In my last commentary, I reviewed the heroic struggle of the African-American movement for the attainment of equality of opportunity, beginning in the 1930s and culminating in a constitutional amendment and four federal laws, enacted in the period 1964 to 1968. See “The historic quest for equality of opportunity,” March 14, 2023.
The impact of the civil rights reforms was quickly visible to all. In the percentage of blacks holding elected and appointed political positions and in the content of acceptable political discourse. In the visibility of persons of color in previously racially exclusive public spaces, especially downtown restaurants, stores, and hotels, and in the facilities of interstate travel. In the numbers of blacks in previously all-white or nearly all-white colleges and universities. In the possibilities for purchasing housing. In the number of black personalities visible in the mass media.
It was not that the struggle for equality of opportunity was completely won. But a new legal infrastructure had been created through sustained struggle, and it had the full support of the American power elite, large corporations, the great majority of politicians of national stature, the major news media, and the academic establishment. Such support was not halfhearted, inasmuch as the political, economic, and educational establishment had arrived to understand that the USA would no longer be a prestigious and influential force in world affairs, if it failed to make adjustments in its domestic affairs, in harmony with the worldwide transition from colonialism to neocolonialism. The American social reality with respect to race in the 1970s was not what it had been in the 1940s and 1950s.
Racism continued in two forms. First, there was the survival of blatantly racist attitudes and behavior among a small minority. Secondly, ethnocentric thinking with subtle racist implications was common in white society, inasmuch as few whites made an effort to understand the world from the vantage point of the black experience. Yet it would be an error to give too much importance to such residual racism. The first form of racism did not have enough presence to be an important factor in social dynamics in the long term. The second form, which is a universal human tendency, does not constitute an obstacle to the progress of peoples of color. The first form of residual racism should be addressed by enforcement of existing law; the second form is best addressed through patient, persistent, and respectful explanation.
White racism, of course, was a central factor in the racial unequal distribution of material rewards prior to the reforms of the late 1960s. Thus, white racism should be understood as a central factor historically, leaving a legacy of unequal distribution on the basis of race, that is, leaving a situation in which blacks were disproportionately represented among the poor.
Thus, after the reforms of the 1960s, the focus of attention should have been on the improvement of educational and economic opportunities for the black poor. To attain public support for such a policy, it would not have been feasible to develop a project that responded to the conditions of black poverty and but did not address the needs of the white poor. Political intelligence mandated the necessary effective strategy: a program that responded to the conditions of poverty in all its manifestations, taking into account the important fact that white poverty and black poverty did not have the same causes, conditions, and solutions. This in essence was the argument in the 1980s of the African-American sociologist William J. Wilson, who maintained that the significance of race was declining, and that universal programs attending to the needs of all citizens were necessary for the attainment of support among a consensual majority of the people.1
The new stage of struggle that was called into being by the civil rights and voting rights reforms of 1964 to 1968 was understood by Dr. King.2 In the aftermath of the Birmingham campaigns of 1963, widely perceived as a victory for the movement in the attainment of access to public accommodations, King began to give economic issues a greater priority. In Why We Can’t Wait, written for the most part in 1963, King expressed disappointment that many white allies of the movement thought that blacks would be satisfied with the gains of Birmingham, and many were resentful to learn that blacks were “insisting upon the mass application of equality to jobs, housing, education, and social mobility.”
In accordance with King’s growing awareness of the need for an economic program, King proposed in Why We Can’t Wait a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged.” The proposal included preferential treatment for blacks in education and employment as reasonable compensation for past discrimination. But it also maintained, taking into account the declining number of blue-collar jobs, that government and private industry ought to dedicate themselves to the creative development of new jobs and to protection against unemployment, thereby raising the standard of living of both blacks and poor whites. In this vein, on December 17, 1964, King declared that his recent trip to Scandinavia (to receive the Nobel Peace Prize) had increased his “determination to press even more vigorously for a broad alliance of all forces—Negro and white—dedicated to the achievement of economic justice.”
In 1965, King increasingly turned his attention to the conditions of lower-class blacks in northern cities. Accordingly, SCLC decided to launch a non-violent direct-action campaign in Chicago, focusing on social and economic issues, including overcrowded, inadequate, and segregated housing; low-quality and segregated education; low-paying and second-rate jobs; and police brutality.
As the SCLC Chicago campaign unfolded in 1966, it was decided to focus on discriminatory real estate practices in Chicago. This may have been an unfortunate strategy, because the increasing capacity of middle-class blacks to purchase housing with less racial barriers made possible the outmigration of the black middle class from the neighborhoods to which blacks had been restricted, creating the unintended negative consequence that William J. Wilson called the social isolation of the black poor. In retrospect, it perhaps can be said that it would have been a better strategy to focus on community control of schools, the development of black-owned enterprises, and/or external investment in new economically productive enterprises in the conventional black neighborhoods, all of which point in some way to the socioeconomic development of urban black communities.
In spite of what may have been a misdirected Chicago campaign, King’s ideological development remained focused on questions of economic justice. King was leaving behind the notion of a “coalition of conscience” between blacks and whites, a coalition that sought to pressure the government to protect the rights of blacks. He was moving toward an alternative strategy of a multiracial coalition based in common economic interests, which would have political power, by virtue of its large numbers. In accordance with this alternative notion, King by 1967 was referring to a new phase of the civil rights movement, which would involve a multiracial coalition dedicated to the elimination of poverty and the reduction of inequalities in income, employment, housing, education, and health care. If it were to attain its goals, such a project would benefit blacks disproportionately, but it would benefit a higher absolute number of whites.
In January 1968, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference announced a Poor People's Campaign, involving the occupation of the nation’s capital for three months by poor people. Living in a constructed tent city, the residents of “Resurrection City” would engage in non-violent demonstrations and would make daily trips to the Senate, the House, and government agencies, lobbying the federal government to take action on their demand for “jobs or income for all Americans.” In their initial publication of the action, SCLC made reference to the achievement of basic social and political rights through non-violent struggle in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. It declared that, as are result of our struggle, “we are now more sophisticated; of necessity, we have recreated our vision, placed it in its proper perspective. WE CAN NOW SEE OURSELVES AS THE POWERLESS POOR TRAPPED WITHIN AN ECONOMICALLY ORIENTED POWER STRUCTURE. (Italics mine; capitalization in original).
Even though the Poor People’s Campaign stressed pressuring the federal government, King was definitively moving to the concept of black empowerment. By 1967, King was embracing the concept of black power, which had been dramatically shouted as a slogan in the 1966 Meredith March Against Fear in Mississippi by SNCC Chair Stokely Carmichael, as he was then known. King rejected black power as a slogan, because, he maintained, it connotes violence and black domination, which is confusing to white allies. But he affirmed the need for blacks to attain political and economic strength to achieve legitimate goals. A massive federal government program was necessary, but so was economic self-help within the black community.
In 1968, in speeches to the Chicago Operation Breadbasket on January 6 and to the Ministers Leadership Training Program in Miami on February 19, King called for the development of black-owned economic enterprises as the foundation to black self-determination and community control. In the February 19 address, King declared: “We are determined to control our community. . . . We are going to control that area in which we live. . . . You’re not going to come in there and make money and leave our institutions suffer. . . . We have a responsibility to build a black economic base that strengthens not only our buying power, but our bargaining power.”3
It was not that King in his later evolution thought that white racism was no longer important. Quite the contrary. He believed that racism was the principal reason that white allies of the civil rights era were not on board for the next phase of the civil rights movement. King in 1963, in Why We Can’t Wait, expressed the view that the white retreat from black demands for social and economic rights was consequence of a duality in the American character, in which a deeply ingrained racism existed alongside the ideal of democracy. The lack of remorse for the shameful genocide of the indigenous population is an indication of a profound belief in white supremacy, King wrote.
Similarly, in 1967, in Where Do We Go From Here?, King wrote that whites were unwilling to support the second phase of the civil rights movement because of the “‘congenital conformity’ of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception.” He wrote that, “for the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country even today is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists”
However, King saw the resolution of the inherent national defect of racism through united struggle for a common interest in the attainment of economic justice. Although profoundly disappointed with the deep cultural roots of white racism, he nonetheless saw the redemption of America through a united struggle of the people for social justice. Dr. King never left behind the slogan of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “To Redeem the Soul of America.”
The post-1980 reactionary turn
When the nation turned to neoliberalism in the 1980s, it took economic justice off the table. The presidential candidacies of Jesse Jackson attempted to resurrect attention to social justice in public discourse. His concept of the Rainbow Coalition was an updated reformulation of the notion of a multiracial coalition seeking economic justice, first envisioned by King in late 1964 and put into practice in early 1968. In 1988, the Rainbow Coalition was a significant force within the Democratic Party.
Following the presidential campaign of 1988, the Rainbow Coalition identified the next step as its development as a mass organization, able to educate the people and nominate local candidates for state and federal elected offices. However, Rev. Jackson was unable to attend to this goal. As it was explained to me by former SNCC activist Cleveland Sellers, the Rainbow Coalition organization was dependent on the income that Jackson could generate as a public speaker. The African-American community shared this over-emphasis on Jackson’s celebrity status, in that most Jackson followers were more inclined to be photographed with Rev. Jackson than to do the groundwork necessary for the development of the Rainbow Coalition in the local community.
With hope eclipsed, the left fell into identity politics, which was the first step of the left toward the abandonment of a conventional social justice agenda. The Rainbow Coalition had envisioned a coalition of non-elite social and economic sectors for the purpose of the political empowerment of the people and the renewal of the American promise of democracy, which was understood as one side of the American character. But identity politics left the meaning of the nation to the side. Influenced by post-modern concepts prevalent in elite universities beginning in the 1980s, identity politics considered that the formulation of a narrative for the nation could only be based in subjectivities rooted in particular experiences, and could never have meaning for the nation as a whole. Identity politics focused on the full expression of membership in a particular historically oppressed group, especially blacks, women, and gays.
The political potential of identity politics was less than that of the Rainbow Coalition, because identity politics was a less inclusive calling, taking into account that the Rainbow Coalition called everyone who pertained to what would later be called the 99%; and because identity politics lacked a program and platform for the taking of political power by the people in the long term. This latter shortcoming was of little concern to advocates of identity politics, for whom politics was above all a matter of subjective self-expression. Because of these characteristics, identity politics provoked division among the people.
Seeing the divisive character of identity politics, the elite came to its support after the financial crisis of 2008, thus empowering ideologues of identity politics to arrive to post-modern absurdities, thereby rendering the people, lost in the depths of confusion and division, more powerless than ever. With respect to race, this post-modern turn focused upon subtle forms of residual racism in patterns of speaking to describe American culture as characterized by systemic racism, ignoring the real turn from systemic racism in political-economic-educational institutions since the late 1960s. With post-modern abandon, “critical race theory” declared white racism to be the cause of existing racial economic inequities, ignoring any analysis of the empirical causes of persisting economic racial inequity, such as the national inattention to issues of class inequality; the outmigration of the black middle class from traditional black neighborhoods, generating the social isolation of the black poor; the failure of the black community to build structures of black community control, in accordance with the visions of Malcolm X and King; and the existence in lower-class black neighborhoods of patterns of behavior that are dysfunctional for economic development. The identification of white racism as a cause in persistent racial economic inequity is a non-empirical claim that serves the interests of black middle-class professionals. See “Identity politics crashes; the elite-supported woke comes to the rescue,” April 30, 2021; and “The causes of racial inequality in USA: A look at historic, economic, and cultural factors,” January 14, 2022.
So, leaving behind King’s vision of a multiracial coalition in pursuit of economic justice, leftist radicals have launched a cultural war against racism, calling out alleged individual white racists and delegitimating them with mob attacks. In this uncivil cultural war, individuals pertaining to formerly oppressed peoples claim a special privilege to speak, as though anyone alive today could not accurately claim to be the descendant of an oppressed and/or exploited people, if that were on our agenda.
Where do we go from here?
What can be done to make the United States and the world more democratic? In the context of the abandonment of the conventional leftist social justice agenda, elite manipulated ideological distortions, and the deep confusions and divisions among the people, it is difficult to realistically propose the necessary road. Indeed, the Cuban saying, “Imperialism will always be imperialism,” suggests that there is nothing that can realistically be done. But on the other hand, one of Fidel’s teachings is that “out of the greatest challenges, emerge the greatest opportunities.”
Clearly, we live in a time of decadence, in that both the United States and the neocolonial world-system are in long-term systemic decline, and the elites do not understand the causes of the decline or the necessary adjustments and solutions. Thus, it can be said that we live in a time of great challenge, in which the continually evolving contradictions create more and more problems, and thus more opportunities for new solutions.
In the midst of the current confusions in the United States, neither the ideological left nor the ideological right has sufficient consciousness of the alternative approach to democracy and world peace that is being forged by the ongoing socialist revolutionary processes of China and Cuba. Inasmuch as understanding is advanced through personal encounter with persons from different horizons, especially with the leaders and intellectuals of the movements formed by the oppressed, I believe that intellectuals of the United States could significantly advance their understandings through a persistent study of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions and the teachings of their exceptional leaders. Insights might possibly emerge that would be the foundation for a new generation of exceptional leaders of the people in the United States. They would stand on the shoulders of giants: A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Rev. Jesse Jackson.
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William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); William J Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
See “The Radicalization of Martin Luther King, Jr.” in Charles McKelvey, The African-American Movement: From Pan-Africanism to the Rainbow Coalition (Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, 1995), Pp. 182-204.
These speeches are found in Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center for Non-Violent Social Change, Atlanta, Georgia.