Blog Viewer

50 Years Later, Renewing the Dream By Jules Bernstein

By Pedro A. Valverde posted 08-28-2012 04:42 PM

  
The NELA Exchange Blog is pleased to present the following guest posting by NELA member Jules Bernstein.

August 28 is the 49th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech before a quarter of a million Americans gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and the millions more who watched on television. (As a young lawyer, I was a marshal at the March.) The March is widely credited with helping to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in turn making possible the election in 2008 of Barack Obama as the first black American president.

The March was initiated by A. Philip Randolph, then 74 and the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Bayard Rustin, a long time civil rights and peace activist. Randolph had threatened President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with such a march in 1940, and President Harry S. Truman in 1947, but those marches never took place. Instead, Roosevelt issued an order requiring non-discrimination in hiring in defense industries, and Truman desegregated the military.

But in December, 1962, after the emergence of a newly energized civil rights movement in the South, Randolph and Rustin concluded that the time to march finally had come. Consistent with Randolph and Rustin's long history of advocating broad social and economic reform, the theme of the March on Washington was freedom (the end of segregation and black disenfranchisement) and full employment for all Americans.
           
The core of support for the 1963 March came from the emerging civil rights movement, including the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), led by, among others, John Lewis and Julian Bond, the Congress on Racial Equality, the NAACP and the Urban League. Also critical to the success of the March were progressive unions such as the United Auto Workers, AFSCME, the American Federation of Teachers, and Hospital Workers Local 1199. Churches and religious organizations, black, white, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish were major March supporters and participants. The Kennedy Administration, by contrast, opposed the March for fear it would prove disruptive. Despite its entreaties, the March went forward to overwhelming success.
           
The challenge to the participants and inheritors of the legacy of the 1963 March today is to renew the struggle for social justice on a much broader front than existed 50 years ago. At present, the very foundations of American democracy are crumbling under the weight of the most extreme economic inequality between haves and have-nots that we ever have known, and the undue influence of the rich and powerful over our politics, economy and government. What to do? If Randolph and Rustin were still with us, I believe they would propose to make next year’s 50th anniversary of the 1963 March into a massive March for Jobs, Freedom, Democracy and Social Justice.
           
Who would be there? Major progressive movements have emerged since the 1963 March, of course, on behalf of women's, LGBT and immigrant rights; reproductive freedoms, environmentalism, occupational and food safety, and a host of other causes.  The traditional civil rights and civil liberties groups are still hard at work defending victims of discrimination in employment, education, health care, and criminal justice. The labor movement has become more vocal about the plight of American workers who are the victims of wage theft, under- and unemployment and other aspects of a renewed corporate war on workers. Community groups are increasingly resisting home foreclosures. The participants in the somewhat anarchic and leaderless Occupy movement are still out there, even though they’ve left the parks.
          
Presently, all these movements work largely independently in advancing their specific goals. But a 50th Anniversary March might serve to unite all these groups around the causes of curbing economic inequality, protecting democracy and ending the undue influence of corporate power and the 1 percent. August 28 2013 should be a jumping off point for a new broad coalition to retake our country in the name of restoring power to the people.           

Whether Mitt Romney or Barack Obama is elected president in November, the need for a mass movement for progressive social change and a restoration of democracy will still be acute. We will need a new corps of younger Americans who are prepared to follow in the footsteps of King, Randolph and Rustin in organizing for democracy and social justice. Throughout American history, it has been social movements that have forced politicians to implement progressive social change. That battle can be renewed and reinvigorated on August 28th of next year. 

-- Jules Bernstein
0 comments
234 views

Permalink