A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was the great civil and labor rights leader of the last century, whom I've occasionally mentioned here before. When I was a high school student, my father had given me a biography of Randolph by Jervis Anderson, which made a profound impression on me at the time: this was a great man. Randolph had organized, in the face of many obstacles, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the first half of the last century, a union that represented the overwhelmingly Black porters who tended to passengers on interstate trains (when trains were still the primary form of long distance transport). During WWII, Randolph forced FDR to outlaw racial discrimination in the defense industries; after WWII, Randolph forced Truman to integrate the military. He and Bayard Rustin, another great figure of the last century, organized the 1963 March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famous "I have a dream" speech. Randolph, like Rustin, always emphasized the intersection of labor and civil rights, a view that MLK came around to as well in the years proceeding his assassination.
Randolph and Rustin were what we would now call "democratic socialists," although unlike those who now claim the label (like Bernie Sanders, who is really just an FDR-style social democrat), they really were socialists, recognizing the pathologies of capitalist markets and the central importance of the rights of working people to the civil rights agenda. As Rustin liked to say (he said this in an interview I did with him in the early 1980s for a college radio program called "Focus on Youth"), and I'm paraphrasing from memory: it's no good to have the right to eat at the restaurant if you don't have a job and an income that allows you to eat there.
For that same college radio program, I also interviewed Vernon Jordan (1935-2021), a very different civil rights figure than Randolph or Rustin, one for whom labor rights were an entirely separate issue. I interviewed him when he was still President of the National Urban League, probably some time in 1981, his last year in that job. The reactionary backlash against FDR and the New Deal that began with the election of Ronald Reagan was a major topic of the conversation, as I recall. But at one point, I asked Jordan about Randolph's view that the full realization of civil rights for Black people might require a move towards socialism. Jordan was clearly surprised by the question, but quickly reassured me that he and the National Urban League were firm believers in capitalism! Later in his career, Jordan was a close adviser to the quintessential neoliberal Democrat Bill Clinton, and enriched himself with service on many corporate boards. A firm believer in capitalism, indeed!
Today, there is no major civil rights leader who shares the Randolph-Rustin vision; the closet we come is the intellectual and theoretical work of Adolph Reed. This essay by Reed examines the change in the intellectual ethos of the civil rights movement.
UPDATE: Philosopher Jim Klagge (Virginia Tech) rightly points out that the Rev. William Barber's "Repairers of the Breach" movement is more in the spirit of the Randolph-Rustin tradition (although more closely tied to religion than theirs was).
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