Freedom Budget For All Americans

FREEDOM BUDGET FOR ALL AMERICANS. This ambitious program was put forward in 1966-1967 by trade union and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It was designed to end poverty and unemployment and to provide a decent quality of life for all people in the United States. Intimately connected with the radical upsurge by African Americans for equal rights, “A Freedom Budget” highlighted a strategy crafted to eliminate racism from the country’s political, social and cultural life.

With half a century’s experience in the socialist and labor movements, Randolph was convinced that racial justice was ultimately inseparable from economic justice. Gathered around him were an impressive cluster of younger civil rights, labor and socialist activists who shared this orientation. This group included Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and many others.

While opposing various personal forms of racism, Randolph and his co-thinkers focused on “institutional racism,” which included contemporary racial segregation laws and practices but also profound inequities rooted in centuries of racism in the United States. Structural racism was manifest in gross differentials in poverty and unemployment rates, life expectancy and infant mortality rates, quality of housing and neighborhoods, and educational opportunities. Not only was structural racism devastating for African Americans and other people of color, but it also undermined the quality of life of so-called “white” workers as well. The Freedom Budget flowed from this analysis.

In 1963, Randolph and other organizers effectively drew up plans what would become known as the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. They aimed to mobilize many thousands of Blacks, as well as growing numbers of white supporters, and simultaneously underscore the strategy of linking racial justice and economic justice –hence the title “March for Jobs and Freedom.”

All major civil rights leaders joined Randolph in sponsoring the March, but the key organizers were a group of people in and around the Socialist Party of America. Randolph’s protégé Bayard Rustin directed the effort. Rustin “was like superman,” remembered Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Turé), “hooking socialism up with the black movement, organizing blacks.” He drew together an amazing team of younger socialist cadres, Black and white. Many were in the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

On the morning following the March, a two-day “Conference on the Civil Rights Revolution” convened, organized by the Socialist Party and drawing together several hundred activists –youth and elders – to discuss the socialist-inflected strategy that blended the goals of racial and economic justice. Randolph and Rustin were key speakers, focusing on the themes that would frame “A Freedom Budget for All Americans.”

Others would also play key roles in advancing the Freedom Budget. One was Leon H. Keyserling, who developed economic policy in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Michael Harrington – whose exposé of poverty, The Other America, had been a best-seller – was involved, along with economists from the AFL-CIO. The best-known advocate was Martin Luther King, Jr. Endorsed by prominent of civil rights activists, trade unionists, academics, religious figures, and others, the Freedom Budget projected a dramatic power shift and reordering of priorities. With its publication in 1966, Randolph explained: “The ‘Freedom Budget’ spells out a specific and factual course of action, step by step, to start in early 1967 toward the practical liquidation of poverty in the United States by 1975.” Moreover, the Freedom Budget would end economic disparity between Black and whites, not by taking jobs away from whites, but by providing jobs and decent incomes for all. A powerful interracial movement of the working-class majority, with a deepening solidarity, would replace racial antagonism.

Freedom Budget ended in defeat. Its architects labored to ensure that its implementation would be compatible with the capitalist economy and even with no cuts in the military budget, a position that some on the Left denounced. The proposal’s timing was problematic, coming when the US war in Vietnam was rapidly escalating and demanding increased government resources. Additionally, the proposers themselves were divided on US involvement in Vietnam. Indeed, the civil rights coalition that had culminated in the massive 1963 March on Washington was breaking up. The Freedom Budget was, in the end, too radical for most politicians, including President Lyndon Johnson and his more conservative successor, Richard Nixon –but also for the leaders of the AFL-CIO.

Randolph continued to insist that structural racism was fundamentally the consequence of “a market economy in which investment and production are determined more by the anticipation of profits than by the desire to achieve social justice.” His ally Martin Luther King, Jr. folded the Freedom Budget into his last great effort, the Poor People’s Campaign. Before he was killed, King looked to “revitalized sectors of the labor movement” to bond with other social movements in order to “reshape economic relationships and usher in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.”

A. Philip Randolph Institute. A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Budgeting Our Resources 1966-1975 to Achieve “Freedom From Want.” New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute (October) 1966.

Anderson, Jervis. A. Philip Randolph, A Biographical Portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

D’Emelio, John. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Jackson, Thomas F. From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Le Blanc, Paul and Michael D. Yates. A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013.

“A Freedom Budget for All Americans.” A. Philip Randolph Institute. https://www.prrac.org/pdf/FreedomBudget.pdf