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 * Ideas
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 * The Ambitions of the Civil Rights Movement Went Far Beyond Affirmative Action


THE AMBITIONS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT WENT FAR BEYOND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Martin Luther King, Jr. (fourth from left), A. Philip Randolph (second from
right), and other civil rights and religious leaders walk with thousands of
protesters for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in Washington,
D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963.
MPI/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Ideas
By Jerome Karabel
June 29, 2023 11:57 AM EDT
Karabel is a Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California,
Berkeley, and is currently writing a book, Outlier Nation: The Epochal History
of How The United States Became a Country Like No Other. He is the author of the
award-winning book, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and has previously written for The New York Times,
The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Nation, Le Monde
Diplomatique, and other publications.

The Supreme Court’s elimination of affirmative action is undeniably a setback
for racial justice—one that will lead to a substantial decline in Black and
perhaps Hispanic enrollments in universities and professional schools. It will
lead as well to a narrowing of the pipeline that supplies much of the nation’s
leadership. But it is also an opportunity—a moment to reconsider far more
ambitious and effective strategies for achieving racial justice.

Affirmative action was never the true goal of the civil rights movement; the
ultimate prize was full racial equality. At best a consolation prize,
affirmative action was a modest concession granted by the Establishment in a
time of turbulent racial upheaval. To be sure, the vast majority of civil rights
leaders favored affirmative action: as Martin Luther King Jr wrote, “A society
that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now
do something special for him.” But the demands of the civil rights movement went
far beyond affirmative action—a policy that was effective in altering the racial
composition of the elite, but left the conditions of most African-Americans
unchanged.

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At the height of the civil rights movement, five organizations dominated the
struggle for racial justice: Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Urban
League, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Following the
great legal victories of the movement—the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights of 1965—the leaders of the Big Five came together to
support an ambitious 1966 program, analogous to a domestic Marshall Plan, named
A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans. Coauthored by A. Philip Randolph and
Bayard Rustin, and supported by the presidents of key labor unions including the
United Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers of America, prominent
Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders, and eminent intellectuals such as John
Kenneth Galbraith, David Riesman, and Daniel Bell, it brought together a broad
coalition in support of a plan calling for the total elimination of poverty by
1975.

But the Freedom Budget was far more than a plan to help the poor. Alongside its
assault on poverty, it proposed a multi-pronged program, including full
employment, a massive public housing initiative, expanded investment in
education job training, a nationwide and universal system of health insurance,
and a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans. Well aware that a program of
this magnitude would disproportionately help black Americans who were
concentrated in the lower runs of America’s social structure, the authors of the
Freedom Budget emphasized that a clear majority of America’s poor and unemployed
were white. In his introduction to a summary version of the Freedom Budget, A.
Philip Randolph, the great elder statesman of the civil rights movement who had
inspired the 1963 March on Washington, wrote of “the tragedy…that the workings
of our economy so often pitted the white poor and the black poor against each
other at the bottom of society.” Only a coalition bringing together all races,
argued Randolph and Martin Luther King, who wrote the Foreword to A Freedom
Budget for All Americans, could generate the political pressure necessary to
make the Freedom Budget a reality.

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The Freedom Budget marked the next stage of the civil rights movement; having
won civil and political rights, the movement was now demanding social and
economic rights. Had it been adopted, the Freedom Budget would have moved the
United States several steps towards a Scandinavian-type social welfare state; in
so doing, it would have massively improved the life conditions of not only black
Americans, but poor and working-class Americans of all races. But, the Freedom
Budget was expensive; costing 185 billion dollars over ten years (the equivalent
of over 1.7 trillion dollars today), it fell victim to both the escalating cost
of the war in Vietnam, where nearly 400,000 American troops were stationed by
the end of 1966, and a rising white backlash.

From left, Morris B. Abram, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph,
John Lewis and William T. Coleman take part the White House Conference on Civil
Rights with a call for $100 billion "Freedom Budget".
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The Freedom Budget was by no means the only African-American voice calling for
fundamental change. In the same month that the Freedom Budget was published, the
newly formed Black Panther Party issued its “Ten-Point Program.” Far more
radical than the Big Five civil rights organizations, the Panthers demanded
reparations in the form of currency reflecting the “overdue debt of forty acres
and a mule,” an “immediate end to police brutality and the murder of black
people,” that “all black men…be exempt from military service,” “freedom for all
black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails,” and
“land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.” Taken together,
the demands of the Panther Party platform constituted a call for an end to
capitalism and the initiation of a vaguely defined revolution.



In the wake of the violent racial rebellion in Newark, Detroit and other cities
in the summer of 1967, even Establishment voices issued calls for drastic
change. On July 28, 1967, while Detroit was still in flames, President Johnson
formed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder (later widely known as
the Kerner Commission) to understand the cause of the riots that had shaken
American cities and to suggest policies that would prevent such riots from
occurring in the future. But The Kerner Report was not what President Johnson
had expected. Reflecting the sense of crisis then gripping the nation, the
report declared, in a passage that has echoed through time, that “what White
Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is
that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions
created it, white institutions maintained it, and white society condones it.”

For an Establishment panel, the Kerner Commission’s recommendations were
surprisingly bold: the creation of two million jobs, the establishment of
“uniform national standards of assistance at least as high as the single
‘poverty level’ of income,” bringing “six million new and existing units of
decent housing within the reach of low and moderate income families within the
next five years,” and a transformation in the organization and functioning of
policing. Like the Freedom Budget, the cost of the programs proposed by the
Kerner Commission would run into the tens of billions of dollars. And like the
Freedom Budget, after an initial wave of enthusiasm (selling three quarters of a
million copies in the first two weeks alone), the escalating cost of the Vietnam
War and a rising racial backlash would mean that the Commission’s ambitious
proposals would never be implemented.



Martin Luther King Jr praised the Kerner Commission Report when it was released
on March 1, 1968, calling it “a physician’s warning of approaching death, with a
prescription for life.” At the time the Kerner Report was published, however,
King was deeply absorbed in planning his Poor People’s Campaign—an effort to
bring poor people of all races together in an effort at mass mobilization, using
civil disobedience if necessary. The Poor People’s Campaign, as King envisioned
it, would culminate in a giant and sustained demonstration in Washington DC,
demanding that the nation’s politicians finally act to end the scandal of
poverty in the world’s richest nation. Over the past several years, King had
become increasingly militant, telling journalist David Halberstam that “after
laboring with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a
little change here, a little change there,” he had come to believe that what was
needed was a “reconstruction of the entire society.” At a staff retreat of the
SCLC, King went even further, privately telling those present that it was time
to disrupt business as usual in “earthquake proportions,” that “something is
wrong…with capitalism” and that “America must move towards a democratic
socialism.” But on April 7, 1968, King’s plans for the Poor People’s
Campaign—and any elaboration of his increasingly radical worldview—came to a
tragic end with his assassination in Memphis.



More than half a century later, what is striking about revisiting the
aspirations of the 1960s civil rights movement is how peripheral affirmative
action was to its deepest aspirations. In place for two generations, affirmative
action has undeniably produced considerable achievements: the diversification of
the nation’s leading colleges and universities, the massive expansion of the
black middle class, and the creation of a leadership stratum more representative
of the American people. One should not, however, exaggerate the magnitude of the
changes it produced. As Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff, who have
written several influential books on diversity in the American elite, observe,
minorities selected into the elite “share the prevailing perspectives and values
of those already in power.” Their ethos “is not ‘multicultural’ in any full
sense of the concept, but only in terms of ethnic or racial origins.”

Yet however one judges the ultimate impact of affirmative action, it is now a
policy of the past. For those who remain committed to the cause of racial
equality, the ideas of the mainstream of the civil rights movement of the
1960s—among them, a concerted assault on poverty, the adoption of a nationwide
guaranteed income, universal healthcare, the creation of the European-style
welfare state, and the formation of the multiracial coalition of poor and
working class people as the vehicle most likely to lead to its adoption—remain
relevant. In a society in which the wealth gap between white and black
households remains yawning— $188,2000 for whites compared to $24,100 for
blacks–something far more powerful than affirmative action is still needed. In
searching for solutions, we would do well to return to the vision of such giants
of the civil rights movement as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin
Luther King, Jr.





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