Freedom Budget: The Promise of the Civil Rights Movement for Economic Justice

Abstract

Civil rights leaders and organizers animated by socialist perspectives were a key element in all that happened in the civil rights movement, from 1955 to 1968. These included A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—central figures in the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organically connected to the Washington March was a document to which all three were committed, The Freedom Budget for All Americans, advanced in 1966. It promised the full and final triumph of the civil rights movement, to be achieved by going beyond civil rights, linking the goal of racial justice with the goal of economic justice for all people in the United States. This was to be brought into being by rallying massive segments of the 99% of the American people in a powerfully democratic and moral crusade embracing the civil rights movement, the labor movement, progressive‐minded religious communities, students and youth as well as their elders.