Black and White: Unite and Fight?

In late August 1963, a few days after a quarter-million Americans gathered in Washington, D.C. to demonstrate support for civil rights legislation, socialist writer and activist Michael Harrington published an article on the future of the movement. Harrington had participated in civil rights protests since the mid-1950s; in 1960, working with Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders, he coordinated round-the-clock picketing of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in support of a strong civil rights plank for the party platform. For the next three years, thanks to the Freedom Rides and the Birmingham protests, civil rights moved from the periphery to the center of national debate. Harrington believed the movement held the potential to give American politics an enormous shove leftwards, because “white and Negro working men and women have a basic and common interest against the alliance of racism and profiteering.” ¹

Since the late 1930s, Harrington noted, the possibilities for significant national reform had been blocked by a congressional bloc of southern Dixiecrats and conservative Republicans. Equal rights for blacks in the South, and especially voting rights, were the key to a realignment of American party politics which could break the stranglehold of the Dixiecrats on the southern Democratic party and the congressional agenda. If economic interest rather than racial prejudice came to determine voting behavior, and if “Negroes and whites with the same urgent need for social change pooled their resources in a single movement which was uncompromisingly for civil rights and housing and education and a decent wage,” then, Harrington argued, “there would be real progress in the land.” ²

Of course, that turned out to be a very big “if.”

With the advantage of thirty years’ hindsight, Harrington’s optimism in the early 1960s may seem the product of a sentimental and archaic Marxism. But in thinking back on the politics of that decade, we should remember how seriously this perspective was taken by an influential group of liberal and radical activists and thinkers. This grouping, which included some prominent and powerful trade unionists in its ranks, amounted to an informally organized American social democratic party: egalitarian in its social agenda, regarding labor as a key if not central agent of social change, committed to working through or influencing the Democratic party, and, to one degree or another, anticommunist.

Although the social democratic realignment strategy proved a lost cause historically, for at least a few years in the 1960s it was not an utterly forlorn hope. We will know a good deal more about its potential and limits when a number of works currently in progress, including Nelson Lichtenstein’s biography of Walter Reuther, Kevin Boyle’s study of the United Auto Workers and labor-liberalism, and John D’Emilio’s biography of Bayard Rustin, become available. Collectively these and other efforts add up to what may someday be called the “new history of American social democracy.” ³

In the meantime, two new works provide valuable clues as to why the social democratic vision of a unified labor and civil rights movement proved so difficult to achieve. In Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954–1968, political scientist Alan Draper contends that the southern labor movement “made significant contributions to the struggle for black equality which have not received the attention they deserve” (pp. 6–7). And in Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement, historian James R. Ralph, Jr., challenges the “conventional assessment” that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) campaign in Chicago in 1966 was a failure. “King and SCLC,” he writes, “with the help of Chicago insurgents, managed, as they had in Birmingham and Selma, to spotlight an injustice for Chicagoans and the nation to...