August 28, 2008 marks the 45th anniversary of the March on
Washington. Forty-fifth anniversaries rarely garner the kind of
attention reserved for their quarter and half-century counterparts. But
as the Democratic Party prepares to nominate a black man as its
presidential candidate on the anniversary of the march, the Obama
campaign is doing its best to co-opt the rally's legacy in its effort
to reinforce the notion that the charismatic centrist black politician
is operating in the tradition of civil rights leaders past.
To be sure, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) was right when he asserted in a recent New York Times Magazine
interview that Obama's successes offer a window onto just how far the
nation and the Democratic Party have come since the 1963 rally. Still,
as Obama attempts to play on the legacy of the march by accepting the
nomination not at the convention hall but at Denver's Mile High Stadium
before an audience of 75,000 people, we should probably ask whether the
black Democratic presidential nominee's political approach is really in
step with at least the spirit of the March on Washington.
When most of us think of the March on Washington of 1963 we think of
Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech. The slain civil rights
leaders' prowess behind a podium; King's posthumous transformation into
an iconic figure who "was the civil rights movement;" and advertisers'
distasteful use of "The Speech" to sell products ranging from renewable
energy to airtime on Hip-Hop and R&B radio have all ensured King's
tagline would take on a life of its own -- like the visage of Che
Guavara -- in our collective memory.
Unfortunately, the tendency to reduce the rally to a mere vehicle
for King's uplifting oratory has obscured a number of crucial realities
about the March on Washington that have much to tell us about the
workings of social movements as well as our current prospects for a new
progressive politics.
There are three often overlooked facts about the march that are worthy of special consideration this election year.
First, while King did help organize the March on Washington, he was
not the rally's principal organizer. The 1963 protest had three
architects: leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association and SCLC
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., noted black labor leader and
religious agnostic A. Philip Randolph, and CORE guru and openly-gay-man
Bayard Rustin. These three organized the march in conjunction with a
host of organizations including: CORE, SNCC, the NAACP, the National
Urban League, SCLC, the Negro American Labor Council and the United
Auto Workers.
Second, organizers conceived the march with at least two policy
objectives in mind. The interracial rally was intended to demonstrate
broad support for what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 --
which established the legal framework for federal affirmative action
policies. March organizers also hoped to pressure the Kennedy
administration to implement New Deal-styled jobs programs to counter
the growing economic divide between blacks and whites wrought by
deindustrialization and racial discrimination in employment and
housing. To these demands, President Lyndon Johnson would respond with
his inadequate War on Poverty.
Finally, the 1963 March on Washington was neither spontaneous nor
was it a novel concept. The rally's origins actually date back to fall
of 1940, when A. Philip Randolph, who was already a well-known labor
leader, first used the threat of a march on Washington to pressure
President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802. EO 8802
not only proscribed discriminatory employment practices in federal
agencies and among defense contractors but it established the Fair
Employment Practices Committee, which was to ensure that all bodies
covered by the act complied with the federal directive. While Southern
Democrats killed the FEPC at the end of World War II, grassroots
support for anti-discrimination legislation among minorities and racial
liberals led more than 20 states to create their own FEPCs. One of
these so-called state FEPCs, New York's State Commission Against
Discrimination (SCAD), would eventually serve as a blueprint for the
body that enforces affirmative action policy to this very day, the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
What the history of the March on Washington tells us then is that
social movements are not simply spiritual awakenings. They are
political struggles that can take decades to achieve their aims. Social
movements also require the dedication of hundreds or even thousands of
men and women working towards reasonably well defined, tangible goals.
For historians, the mythology about the March on Washington and
progressive social movements in general is problematic partly because
it's just wrong. The tendency to conflate a cult of personality with a
movement, however, is not just a vexing problem for scholars. The now
commonsensical belief that a single individual can -- like a hero in a
Wachowski brothers movie -- transform society simply through the
strength of his/her character, the sincerity of his/her words, and the
righteousness of his/her cause has clouded the vision of contemporary
pundits, voters, and even activists in this election year, leading too
many to presume that Barack Obama -- who is arguably the most
charismatic Democratic Presidential nominee since Bill Clinton and
certainly the blackest option for President the United States has ever
seen -- will usher in a new progressive era in American politics.
In Obama's case, the messianic model of progressive politics that
has come to dominate popular discourse about social movements is
especially problematic, as his record as a progressive is spotty at
best.
Obama may be hailed and assailed as a 60s-styled leftist but
whatever the hype, after sewing up the nomination he has tacked ever
further to the right. As several others have noted in the Black Agenda
Report and elsewhere, over the last few months Obama has indicated a
willingness to sacrifice our civil liberties on the altar of the war on
terror (remember the evolution of his stance on FISA?); he has sided
with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on recent Supreme Court
decisions on gun control and capital punishment; and he has
consistently emphasized the alleged cultural pathologies of the black
poor to help explain African American poverty, further validating a
nearly thirty- year old agenda to justify federal retrenchment and the
widening gulf between rich and poor in America.
I know the orthodoxy holds that Obama, like all Democratic Presidential nominees, has to run to the right to win the general election;
but, as others before me have pointed out, Obama's political
dispositions - from his days as a community activist through four years
in the US Senate -- have long led him down the path of least resistance.
More to the point, if it is indeed true that Obama has to run to the
right to win, this "fact" should call into question both the idea that
Obama "is a different kind of candidate" and the very notion that he is
actually capable of ushering in a progressive movement a la King -- in
myth or reality.
Just consider this: King, Randolph, and Rustin may have tailored the
tactics and goals of the March for Jobs and Freedom to political
realities. But they did not pander to opponents to their right. In
fact, these civil rights activists actually organized the march over
the objections of influential liberals, their alleged allies, including
President John F. Kennedy. March organizers ultimately refused to
capitulate to the President's requests to call off the rally for two
reasons. First, they understood what Frederick Douglass articulated so
eloquently more than 150 years ago, "power concedes nothing without a
demand." Second, King, Randolph, Rustin and the march they helped
organize were all part of an extant insurgent political movement. This
meant that their political base was beyond the control of the
Democratic Party's apparatus, empowering them, if you will, to press
their demands in the face of opposition from both their enemies and
their putative friends.
In this light, Obama's mantra "yes we can" cannot hold a candle to
King's "I have a dream." Not because King was a more eloquent speaker
than Obama. But because King's mythical speech was, in reality, just an
exclamation point -- albeit a powerful one -- in a vibrant political
insurgency.
When Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama wraps himself in
the legacy of the March for Jobs and Freedom this August 28,
progressives should reflect on how Obama's career to date stacks up
against the hype.
If we must compare Obama to liberal icons past, his record indicates
that Obama's political vision probably owes more to John F. Kennedy --
the guy who opposed the March on Washington and the Freedom Rides two
years earlier in the name of moderation -- than the organizers of the
march that helped push Kennedy and later Lyndon Johnson to enact the
very legislation that laid the foundation for Obama's professional and
political aspirations.
So if Obama is elected president, progressives should be
prepared to pressure him to follow through on liberal economic and
social reform. He will not do it on his own.