King and a photo of Mohandas Gandhi in his Southern Christian Leadership Conference office in Atlanta, 1966.
“NORTHERN GHETTOS ARE THE PRISONS OF FORGOTTEN MEN”
Labor and Civil Rights at the
Crossroads, 1964–1966
I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.
—KING NOBEL PEACE PRIZE SPEECH,
OSLO, NORWAY, DECEMBER 10, 1964
ON JANUARY 3, 1964, TIME ONCE AGAIN PUT MARTIN Luther King on its cover, naming him “Man of the Year.” The magazine lauded 1963 as a transformational year, as schools desegregated, some previously closed job opportunities and apprenticeships opened for some blacks, and the mass media finally began to feature African Americans. Time noted, “The most striking aspect of the revolt, however, is the change in Negroes themselves.” More black people were more sure of themselves, and less afraid. King, who traveled 275,000 miles and gave over 350 speeches in 1963, had faced down death threats and inspired the nation while living in modest circumstances and sleeping about four hours each night, according to the article. It concluded, “After 1963, with the help of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Negro will never again be where he was.”
This kind of admiration for King only convinced J. Edgar Hoover that King’s subversion had to be exposed. On January 5–7 the FBI placed microphone surveillance on King’s room at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. At least fourteen more times between January 1964 and November 1965, the FBI placed “bugs” in rooms occupied by King and his entourage.
After President Kennedy’s death, Hoover continued to feed poisonous lies to President Johnson and the media about King and his supposedly communist associates. In 1965 a congressional committee led by a powerful segregationist planned to investigate Hoover’s claims that King was a secret communist. Fearing his “counterintelligence” would be exposed by hearings, Hoover stopped the wiretaps on King’s home and office. But the FBI continued to wiretap Stanley Levison, attorney Clarence Jones, and others who worked with King. The FBI’s continual campaign of harassment and intimidation against King ranks as one of the most sordid and unconstitutional uses of governmental power against one individual in American history.
In 1964 FBI harassment proved minor compared to the violence visited upon movement organizers. In March through June, King undertook desegregation marches through the old slave quarter in St. Augustine, Florida, with marchers suffering attacks by white vigilantes and police using whips and tire irons. Dorothy Cotton recalled with horror how racists poured acid into a swimming pool when protesters tried to “integrate” it. King’s June 11 imprisonment there produced no intervention by the federal government. In July, as King published Why We Can’t Wait, on the urgency of the civil rights movement, SCLC went into Mississippi to support SNCC’s Freedom Summer voter registration campaign.
On June 21, 1964, nine white men, including the Neshoba County sheriff, kidnapped northern volunteers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney from a jail and beat them to death. Finally taking some action to enforce the law in the South, the FBI undertook an investigation and found their bodies buried in an earthen dam two months later. Mississippi refused to prosecute, and it would be years before the federal government could put anyone in jail for this brutal crime. In the last week of July, King also lobbied on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in its effort to replace the state’s white segregationists at the Democratic Party national convention. That ended with Walter Reuther pressuring King to pressure the MFDP to accept two seats at the convention, even as the all-white Mississippi “regulars” walked out. Fannie Lou Hamer famously rejected compromise, saying “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats.” The labor–civil rights alliance between Reuther and King did not look good to SNCC organizers, who saw it as a sellout. SNCC remained alienated from the Democratic Party, but some in the MFDP went on to elect blacks to office in Mississippi. Hamer organized the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, but mechanization of cotton production destroyed her efforts to raise wages for agricultural workers.
Despite such setbacks, the summer of 1964 showed promise for the civil rights–labor coalition. Powerful combined lobbying by the AFL-CIO and the civil rights movement helped Johnson to defeat a long filibuster of southern Democrats and northern Republicans. After President Johnson got some moderate Republicans to sign on to the legislation, on July 2 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. It banned segregation in all public accommodations and made employment discrimination based on race, national origin, or gender illegal. Through Title VII, women and workers of color could now sue employers and unions alike for excluding them from union apprenticeships, for perpetuating color-coded wage and departmental discrimination in factories, and for keeping them out of better jobs. This change in the law had profound effects on the workplace.
The new law opened up decades of direct action and litigation by workers of color and women. Black workers in places like Memphis challenged “whites only” job classifications and entered skilled and semiskilled jobs, as did black workers across the South in the rubber, textile, and other industries in record numbers. They experienced violent resistance from white workers and marauding racists. On February 28, 1967, Klansmen would use a car bomb to murder Wharlest Jackson, a military veteran and treasurer of his NAACP branch, after he obtained a semiskilled job in the Armstrong Tire plant in Natchez, Mississippi. Despite such violence against black workers who tried to get better jobs, the civil rights “revolution” would have a major impact in reshaping the demographics of the workplace.
Just as some economic progress began, President Johnson, persuaded that military intervention around the world was necessary to stop countries “falling like dominoes” to Soviet domination, increasingly intervened in the worsening military conflict in Vietnam. A constant escalation of bombing and troop deployments over the next few years would lead to nearly 500,000 American troops in Vietnam by 1967, to millions of deaths, and to a massive diversion of attention and money from civil rights and economic justice concerns.
The full scope of this tragic move was not apparent in November 1964, however. President Johnson overwhelmingly won reelection with 61 percent of the vote, defeating Republican Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act and all federal efforts on behalf of the poor as an encroachment on individualism and free enterprise. Before 1964, segregationist southern Democrats had controlled Congress, but many civil rights and labor-backed Democrats as well as moderate Republicans now came into power. Together they enacted a whirlwind of progressive legislation, including increased social security benefits, and Medicare and Medicaid that guaranteed older and poorer people would not die for lack of health insurance.
In January 1965, in his State of the Union address, Johnson called for a “War on Poverty.” Michael Harrington’s book The Other America (1962) had publicized the desperate plight of millions of poor people in a supposedly affluent society. In a later speech at Howard University, Johnson proclaimed that “freedom is not enough.” The president called not just for equal opportunity in the law, but for some measure of equal results. This remarkable shift in public policy and rhetoric could be traced to the rising power of civil rights and the labor movements at the grass roots and in the halls of Congress. King optimistically believed that “Goldwaterism” had been defeated and that the trajectory of history favored greater equality and human rights throughout the world. Ominously, however, voters in four southern states, where most black people could not vote, switched from Democrat to Republican in the presidential election in opposition to civil rights gains. This realignment of white southern voters was just what President Johnson feared.
In the aftermath of the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the 1964 elections, an exhausted King, lying in an Atlanta hospital bed, learned that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. On November 18, a countervailing pressure came from FBI director Hoover. Incensed that a black man whom he despised would get world recognition, Hoover publicly denounced King as “the most notorious liar in America.” Nobody knew what he meant. On December 2, King went to Washington to try to talk with Hoover and defuse his personal animus. Instead, Hoover lectured King on the merits of the FBI and avoided any discussion of the issues between them. But he had already launched a surreptitious program to destroy King’s personal life and national reputation.
On December 10, 1964, King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. He called the award “a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral problems of our time: the need to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.” Nonviolence provided a viable “method which rejects, revenge, aggression and retaliation” based on a foundation of love. King now broadened his public agenda from civil rights to human rights, to peace, and to end poverty. He donated his $54,000 award to American civil rights groups. The Nobel award raised his spirits immensely. He and his family and some staff all went to the ceremony (Coretta and her husband flew separately, as a safety measure to protect their four children if something happened to one of them). The prize was a joy, but it also raised a challenge: King now had the mantle of a peace and human rights world leader, and he would have to live up to it.
* * *
ON HIS WAY home from Oslo, large crowds in New York City showered praise and a ticker-tape parade on King. King and his staff had already planned a voting rights campaign. When President Johnson invited him to stop at the White House on his way back to Atlanta, King pressed him to introduce new legislation to guarantee voting rights. The Civil Rights Act had already cost him the votes of many white southerners, and Johnson did not want to alienate white southern Democrats in Congress whose votes he needed to pass his antipoverty programs.
The day after King got home to Atlanta, he went out on the picket line with some seven hundred black women, wearing a sign around his neck that read, “Scripto employees are on strike for a living wage.” His companion, preacher-organizer Ralph David Abernathy, wore a sign proclaiming, “We Wont be Slaves No More.” Scripto’s sprawling pen-and-pencil factory was located only two blocks from Ebenezer Church. Most of its women production-line workers lived in the neighborhood and many of them went to King’s church. The Scripto strike tested his idea that labor and civil rights forces could work together to obtain a greater share of economic justice for workers. The strike and related events and situations also demonstrated the complications of a labor–civil rights coalition.
Scripto and its president, James Carmichael, had led Atlanta’s civic and political life for years, and claimed Scripto was a boon to black workers. In 1964, this factory employed black women who would otherwise be consigned to jobs as domestic, laundry, and service workers under worse conditions and with poorer wages. However, the company always remained entangled with the South’s racial and economic injustices. It had been the site of the notorious lynching of a Jewish plant manager named Leo Frank, and it had always profited from the low wages of blacks. In the 1930s the Scripto company violated the New Deal National Recovery Administration’s minimum wage code, paying black women workers between six cents and thirteen cents an hour, arguing that it was doing a favor to women who might otherwise have to do lower-paid domestic work.
Through speed-up and overwork, the company received multiple awards for high levels of production by its black women workers during World War II, but then those workers organized a union. In October 1946 they went on a strike that lasted into the Christmas season, but in the face of a determined antiunion employer they lost the strike and their union. Eighteen years later, black women replayed that struggle. They now made $1.25 an hour, a total of about $2,600 a year before deductions, when the commonly estimated national poverty level for a family wage earner was $3,000. The company employed 117 skilled and semiskilled male workers, all of them white except for six black men. It insisted that undereducated black women could not do these better-paid skilled and semiskilled jobs.
As the freedom movement exploded across the South, in late 1962 a black Baptist minister named James Hampton had arrived as an organizer for the International Chemical Workers Union (ICWU), building support among black churches. A year later, boosted by supporters in the church and community, a majority of the women turned in cards calling for a union. Scripto appealed that election to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the company’s president, James Carmichael, gave a speech to a captive audience of workers, calling “a vote for the union a slap in the face of one of the truest friends the Negro ever had in Georgia.” The company objected to the NLRB that the union had unfairly enlisted support from the civil rights movement.
Indeed, civil rights unionism had flared up everywhere in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham desegregation campaign. At Scripto, black women like M. L. Spearman and Emma Love saw no reason to hold back. Rosella Jackson had lied about her age to get a job at Scripto because it paid better than her previous laundry work. On September 27, 1963, a week after the infamous Birmingham church bombing, these women voted for a union. A total of 519 Scripto workers voted for the union, with 428 against.
The NLRB required the company to respond, but Scripto stalled and made a charade of collective bargaining. Under the state’s right-to-work law, the company’s skilled workers knew they could benefit from any gains made by the union without having to pay dues or cooperate with black women workers. That was the point: the “right to work” kept workers divided.
In the fall of 1964 the women lost patience. Jerry Levine, a Brooklyn native and the union’s new organizer in Atlanta, told the women they had no strike fund and would lose a Christmas bonus if they struck. Levine pleaded with them to hold off, but, like the Memphis sanitation strikers in 1968, they followed their own leadership. On Thanksgiving Day 1964 they voted to strike, hand-lettered strike signs, and walked off the job the next day. Large numbers turned out for rallies, and women walked the picket line for weeks to come.
Scripto resisted a check-off system that would allow the union to collect dues from worker paychecks—the same issue that would stall the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968. Scripto fired 155 of the strikers and operated the plant with a skeleton crew of nonunion workers (“scabs”). It offered a two-cent wage increase to black women classified as unskilled, and a four-cent increase for white male workers and six black men classified as skilled. Black women workers saw this as an insulting form of racial discrimination and division. One of them told the Atlanta Daily World, a black-owned newspaper, that the strike represented “a struggle for human dignity.”
SNCC chairman John Lewis, located in Atlanta, wrote to the General Services Administration asking them to review the Scripto Company’s two federal contracts. The only reason the company could outbid others for federal contracts, he wrote, “is because of the low wages they pay their colored employees.” Lewis also wrote to the union, “Scripto has been allowed to perpetrate virtual economic slavery and poor working conditions for such a long time.” King wrote the company a letter threatening a national boycott of its products if Scripto did not settle with the workers. As soon as King got involved, national media such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal covered the strike. On December 17, after King had returned from Oslo, he told a reporter, “We have decided that now is the time to identify our movement very closely with organized labor.”
SCLC’s director of branches Rev. C. T. Vivian enlisted himself as a strong ally of the women workers. SCLC and the union distributed half a million leaflets calling for people to boycott Scripto products. Under Taft-Hartley, unions could not engage in a secondary boycott in support of other workers, but as a nonbargaining agent SCLC had no such limitations. Vivian walked on picket lines throughout the six-week strike. He told the workers, “Labor cannot have what it wants in America until the Negroes have what they want in America. Let us see here in Atlanta that this is not just a protest but a movement.” Daddy King also supported the strikers.
In a 1997 interview, Rev. Vivian told me that he had worked in a factory in his hometown of Peoria, Illinois, and learned about unions through a pamphlet handed out by the United Packinghouse Workers Union. Vivian said unions would only succeed in the South if they frankly confronted the racism of white union members, as the UPWA did. “We depended on labor to deliver for us and it didn’t happen,” he recalled, and yet unions still provided “one of the only allies that black people really had, and one of the only ones that needed us as much as we needed them.” Vivian saw the Scripto strike as a means to promote civil rights unionism.
King had spoken at union conventions, met top union leaders, and raised thousands of dollars from unions, and he now walked a union picket line. The week before Christmas, at Ebenezer Church, King spoke to 250 strikers and community supporters. “Along with the struggle to desegregate we must engage in the struggle for better jobs,” he said, and “the same system that exploits the Negro exploits the poor white man.” However, the plant’s white men and six black men in skilled employment refused to strike. Scripto claimed black women did not know how to do these jobs. King told the cheering crowd, “Negroes can learn to do anything a white man can learn. It was our hands that built up this southland and made cotton King. . . . It’s all right to talk about milk and honey ‘over there’ but we need food down here.” He finished his talk with a call for a world boycott of Scripto products.
Fortunately, as happened later in the Memphis sanitation strike, the Atlanta AFL-CIO’s white union leaders gave financial and moral support to the strikers. But, also as in Memphis, many white union members proved uninterested or hostile. A possible black church split also emerged when workers claimed that one of the city’s leading black ministers, William Holmes Borders, who had a close personal relationship with Scripto’s James Carmichael, had brought strikebreakers into the plant.
Despite such schisms, on the picket line and in church gatherings workers shared labor and civil rights songs such as “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “We Shall Overcome.” But by Christmas Eve, the workers lacked food and presents for their children. They had grown weary of the constant cold and miserable rain on the picket line. Scripto, however, knew it was getting a bad name. A new manager for the company, a northerner, decided to end the strike, and violated NLRB rules to do it. He ignored the union representatives and instead began meeting privately with Dr. King, excluding organizer Jerry Levine.
King had invested himself in this struggle. Suffering from depression and anxiety during the strike, King left his home one night and went off by himself. No one knew where he was. His mother feared something had happened to him and asked a black police officer who had been King’s childhood friend to find him. The man located King outside the Scripto plant, waiting for workers to come out at shift change so he could speak to them. Associated Press reporter Kathryn Johnson later recalled King picketing the plant on a cold night and then inviting her into his home, where Coretta and Martin hosted her for coffee until 1:00 a.m. She thought King’s “ability to put into words the longings, the hopes and dreams of his people” helped the strikers win.
She also remembered that someone had burned a cross on the King family’s front lawn. When a story on the Scripto strike came on the television, her mother spotted Kathryn walking alongside King. Johnson wrote that her mother warned her, “Honey, be careful. I’m afraid someone’s going to try to kill him.” Johnson reflected that “at this time, King was either admired or hated.”
King’s distress and exhaustion were partly thanks to the FBI. On January 5, 1965, the Kings discovered an unusual package in the mail. William Sullivan, Hoover’s agent in charge of ruining King, had sent a tape recording of King and friends partying at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., with an anonymous note suggesting King should kill himself or be exposed for supposed extramarital affairs. The Kings listened to it together, and Coretta said the tape proved nothing. King and his staff also listened to it and realized the FBI was recording his every act. FBI pressure became a source of tremendous anxiety. King concluded, “They are out to break me.”
Meanwhile, Atlanta union lawyer Joe Jacobs had taken over Scripto negotiations, and on January 9, 1964, the strike ended. Both skilled and unskilled workers received a four-cents-an-hour wage increase each year for the next three years, and the company rehired strikers it had fired. Workers who refused to pay union dues or strike now got the same wage increases as the women who had won the strike by paying dues and holding out in the cold for six weeks. The company pledged to open up skilled jobs to more black workers, while SCLC promised to publicize Scripto’s good work and call off its boycott.
Some white business leaders in Atlanta were incensed. Though some of them accepted that King had become world-famous, they did not expect him to challenge one of the city’s major employers and the city’s long-time public servant James Carmichael. An event to recognize King for his Nobel Prize was now in doubt. The KKK denounced King, and white merchant Lester Maddox put ads in the newspaper airing his openly racist views: “And thanks to Scripto for not surrendering your plant to the Communist inspired racial agitators. . . . All Americans are going to lose unless the Communists and racial agitators are stopped and stopped soon.” Subsequently elected as Georgia’s governor, Maddox became infamous for brandishing axe handles and threatening to beat civil rights demonstrators. He referred acidly to King as the “Great Black Father.”
Dorothy Cotton wrote that many white leaders did not want to ever honor a black man. Yet the city’s business and civic leaders held a successful banquet honoring King. And for a moment, the civil rights unionism of black women in Atlanta triumphed. As did the civil rights unionists of the 1940s, black workers voted in NLRB elections even when their voting rights remained restricted in southern society. Speaking to the National Maritime Union in 1962, King had called the secret ballot “our secret weapon” to stamp out segregation. Workers at Scripto had won their rights (and started a scholarship for Atlanta students in King’s name after his death), but they ultimately lost out to the demands of global, corporate capitalism when the company moved away and a Japanese company took it over. On King’s birthday in 1996, the National Park Service purchased the old Scripto property, ruined by decades of the company’s environmental pollution in a neighborhood bereft of industrial jobs. The property became part of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, honoring King’s legacy.
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IN JANUARY 1965 both SNCC and SCLC, although using different organizing strategies, sought to complete the first phase of the civil rights revolution by demanding federal implementation of the right to vote granted by the Fifteenth Amendment after the Civil War. The Supreme Court had already overturned the poll tax, which charged people a fee to vote, and the “white primary,” which excluded black people from the primary of the whites-only Democratic Party, then defined as a private entity. African Americans voted in some places in the South, but in Alabama and Mississippi and most of the region, racist registrars and violent police prevented blacks from voting.
In the first week of February, at a time when President Johnson began relentless bombing of North Vietnam and U.S. troop expansion, King ended up in jail in Selma for protesting voter suppression. Malcolm X gave a speech in Selma criticizing civil rights leadership as not militant enough, but privately told Coretta Scott King that he fully supported her husband’s voting-rights campaign. “If the white people realize what the alternative is,” he told her, “perhaps they will be more willing to listen to Dr. King.” Many people observed Malcolm X moving increasingly toward political action and coalition-building, while King moved increasingly toward a stronger critique of the American system. Activists hoped for an alliance between them. King pointed out more than once, however, that the two men radically differed on the role of self-defense versus nonviolence in social movements.
The Selma campaign brought out other contradictions in the movement. SNCC members campaigned through grassroots organizing. They were “a lot like members of the early Christian church, going out with virtually nothing but the clothes on our backs to bring the Gospel of Freedom to the people,” SNCC chairman John Lewis recalled. They relied on local people to house them and to take leadership for themselves. Many SNCC members did not welcome King’s preacher-led mobilizing strategy in Selma. But whatever method activists used, white southerners responded violently. As in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, activists in Alabama suffered a reign of terror. Economic justice seemed far out of reach without first getting civil and voting rights, but getting those rights cost many lives and left a legacy of post-traumatic stress for many victims of white supremacist violence.
“For blacks, Selma was rock bottom,” wrote Coretta King, “a place where words such as democracy, representative government, and citizenship had no meaning.” On February 18, in her hometown of Marion, Alabama, state troopers attacked marchers and police murdered young military veteran Jimmie Lee Jackson when he tried to protect his mother from a violent police officer. Jackson’s aunt had been one of Coretta’s best friends in high school. It was a fraught time. On February 20, assassins shot Malcolm X to death in Harlem, eliminating one of the era’s great advocates for African-American unity and for racial and economic justice in the world.
SCLC’s James Bevel proposed a march from Selma to Montgomery to protest Jimmie Lee Jackson’s murder. King and SCLC supported it and SNCC did not. John Lewis went to the front of the line anyway as marchers tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. On March 7, before the march could even begin, police and state troopers viciously clubbed him on the head and attacked the marchers with whips and on horseback, in beatings publicized through the mass media all over the world. King led another march but turned marchers around at the bridge, waiting for a federal court judge to rule on behalf of their right to march without police interference. In the meantime, local whites clubbed white Unitarian minister James Reeb of Boston to death in downtown Selma, setting off a national outcry, including a protest from President Johnson, in a way Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death had not. With court approval and state trooper protection, the epochal march from Selma to Montgomery took place March 22–25. In a huge rally at the end of the march in Montgomery, King cited the ways society’s economic elites had used racial division to separate poor whites and blacks, who could be allies and had everything to gain by joining together to build a “society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away.” The American Dream would culminate, he said, in a “March on Poverty” that would leave no one behind. “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man!”
After the march, KKK members shot to death Viola Liuzzo and wounded her nineteen-year-old African-America rider Leroy Moten. FBI informer Gary Thomas Rowe sat in the car of Klan nightriders and may have even pulled the trigger himself. A white woman born in Georgia who rebelled against racism, the working-class wife of an Italian-American Teamster union organizer in Detroit, Liuzzo had driven alone to Selma, determined to support the movement. King and top government officials attended Liuzzo’s funeral in Detroit, and Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa later shook hands with King and donated $25,000 to the movement. But white violence only escalated after the Selma-to-Montgomery march. In “Bloody Lowndes County,” a police “volunteer” killed white seminarian and SNCC worker Jonathan Daniels with a shotgun blast. The killers of Jimmie Lee Jackson, Daniels, Reeb, and Liuzzo all went free. The UAW sent nearly three thousand dollars collected at plant gates on behalf of Jackson’s family and the movement. Twenty people (that we know of) died in civil rights protests in 1965; fourteen in 1964; thirteen in 1963. “Securing the right to vote was a blood covenant, a right won and sealed by the deaths of men and women, whites and blacks, whose blood spilled onto Alabama soil,” wrote Coretta Scott King.
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THE SELMA-TO-MONTGOMERY MARCH marked the high tide of what Bayard Rustin and King called the politics of “convergence” between unions and the civil rights movement. King had written to UAW president Walter Reuther suggesting that SCLC activists should be trained as union organizers in the antiunion South. King and Reuther regularly corresponded and tried to make alliances. In June 1964 George Meany thanked King for helping to mobilize black voters to defeat a right-to-work referendum in Oklahoma; King said “so-called right-to-work will rob us of our civil rights and job rights.” King and Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa discussed alliances but could not cement them. But King regularly traveled to New York City to speak at union rallies and conventions, to give statements, and especially to collaborate with District 65 and 1199 unions. With their diverse memberships, King felt at home in these two unions and considered himself part of their union family. The labor–civil rights coalition seemed strong.
Yet union racial politics remained contradictory and complicated. As soon as King became well known, from 1957 onward, black workers in various places asked him to take up their cause against both employer and white worker union racism. In his hometown of Atlanta during the summer of 1963, leading up to the Scripto strike, black workers at Atlantic Steel sent King detailed complaints of racism in their United Steelworkers Local 2401. King sent written complaints on their behalf to both the federal government and the union hierarchy, prompting a letter of shock and outrage by United Steelworkers international president David McDonald. At Atlantic Steel, about 900 black workers, out of a total of 2,500 in the plant, remained shut out of skilled and semiskilled jobs. They were forced to use separate water fountains, bathrooms, locker rooms, and cafeterias. In this and other situations, black workers found the original appeal of interracial CIO industrial unions sadly lacking. They usually remained the strongest union supporters, but black workers criticized and increasingly challenged unions and battled for equal rights at the point of production.
King thus found himself appealing to international unions for funds and support while challenging these same unions to live up to their civil rights advocacy. In March 1964, at almost the same time that King thanked Transit Worker Union president Michael Quill for hosting him in a speech and donating to SCLC, black workers in that same union at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport wrote to King protesting that the local TWU union was thoroughly racist and he should not cooperate with the union. And when King supported union organizing drives, he almost always ran into difficulties from employers or competing unions.
Nonetheless, many unions supported the Selma campaign, and the heroic dedication of organizers and community activists led to passage of the Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Johnson on August 6, 1965. It abolished Jim Crow voter restrictions and Section 5 subjected states of the former Confederacy to Justice Department or federal court review whenever they adopted new voter laws. After 1965, African American and Latino voter registration shot up in the South—until 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court nullified Section 5. Republican legislatures began imposing restrictions to shrink black and Latino voting once again, and mass incarceration disfranchised many of them.
Despite the triumph of the Voting Rights Act in the summer of 1965, countervailing forces, including the direction of American foreign policy, began to undermine the civil rights movement. In April 1965, Johnson had sent Marines into the Dominican Republic to restore a dictatorial regime overturned by voters, as the United States solidified support for military regimes in Latin America. In July the president announced sending 50,000 more troops to Vietnam, for a total of 125,000. On August 12, at a mass rally in Birmingham, King called for negotiations to end the war, but pressure from the administration forced him to retract his proposal. The “convergence” between labor and civil rights interests that seemed so promising in the voting rights struggle began to turn into divergence as the AFL-CIO unions followed in lockstep with Johnson’s anticommunist militarism and interventionism.
The politics of divergence also accelerated on August 11, only five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. A conflagration in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, the nation’s third largest city, demonstrated how little dismal economic conditions outside of the South had been touched by the civil rights movement. Police violence and rumors triggered a virtual civil war between unemployed and underemployed young black men and white police and National Guard troops, who had most of the guns and all of the tanks. Six days of looting and burning of storefronts and homes led to the deaths of thirty-four people (all but one of them black) and $40 million in property damage.
King had thought the 1964 presidential election sidelined “Goldwaterism”—a call for low taxes, opposition to government programs for civil rights and economic justice, coupled with support for military spending increases and militant anticommunism. But the white reaction to the Los Angeles riots proved King’s optimism wrong. Many white voters turned to the right, while the mayor, police chief, and many white residents blamed King, communists, and ghetto residents for the breakdown in “law and order.” Almost alone among whites, UAW Western Region 6 representative Paul Schrade refused to blame ghetto residents. Speaking to a Governor’s Commission, he said half a million residents of central LA lived near or below poverty level and had half the income and twice the unemployment of whites. Although 50,000 people worked in auto and aerospace and parts plants in the LA area, few blacks or Latinos had those jobs, and they would soon disappear for whites as well.
When King and Bayard Rustin made an emergency trip to Los Angeles, the severity of poverty and tensions between inner-city residents and the police brought them up abruptly against the limits of the civil rights movement. Young African Americans derided King, and white city officials practically ran him out of town. LA was only the tip of the iceberg. Schrade counted up to 43 percent of the nation’s population as economically distressed, with 38 million in deep poverty. Whites made up a majority of the poor, but African Americans and Latinos remained disproportionately poor. Police brutality had touched off riots in New York and elsewhere in the summer of 1964, and now it looked as though riots would happen every summer. King, Randolph, Rustin, and others had been pointing out the link between poverty and racial problems for years, but Watts now placed resolving urban racial-economic injustices at the top of their list of priorities.
Black poor people had moved to the cities during the “Great Migration” from the 1920s through the 1950s, but most of them ended up trapped in old housing and bad schools, subject to police brutality, lacking good jobs, and in neighborhoods that became increasingly segregated as whites fled. Now inner-city upheavals forced unions and civil rights organizations to reorient their racial-economic justice agendas. The UAW ultimately invested about one million dollars in a Reuther-initiated Citizen’s Crusade Against Poverty. It proved to be a drop in the bucket of need, and like President Johnson’s War on Poverty raised unanswered questions about whether poor people themselves would take the leadership. King would say the War on Poverty turned out to be “not even a skirmish,” as Johnson increasingly diverted federal funds to war.
Behind the freedom struggle of black people loomed a larger problem. Black scholar Manning Marable aptly called it “the crisis of the black working class.” The access of black workers, male and female, to industrial employment had increased dramatically in the 1940s, giving rise to a generally higher standard of living and longevity. Unionization powered much of this improvement, narrowing the wealth gap between African Americans and Latinos and Euro-Americans. But the Korean War in the early 1950s marked the last period of relatively low unemployment (4.4 percent) for black males. Black male income had averaged 37 percent of white males’ income in 1939, 54 percent in 1947, and 62 percent in 1951, but by 1962 it had dropped back to 55 percent, about where it had been in 1945. In the early and mid-1960s, racial-economic inequality only increased.
White-collar employment in professional, technical, and clerical jobs provided the most rapid employment growth between 1959 and 1964, but those jobs remained largely reserved for white men and women. Most black women remained concentrated in domestic, laundry, restaurant, and other service work, although some of them now made gains in the lowest-paid white-collar work. Black men remained overwhelmingly concentrated in unskilled labor, a declining portion of the overall labor force. A growing divide emerged between employed black women and unemployed black men.
In the South, manufacturing employment had increased by 80 percent between 1940 and 1960, but employers after 1946 largely defeated unionization. They kept wages in the South lower than the rest of the country, attracting companies fleeing unionized work forces in the North. Industrial employers also “whitened” their work force, which also undermined unions. Whites proved less willing to organize unions than blacks, the strongest pro-union element. And increasingly black workers lost their place in the rural economy, with nowhere to go for better jobs. The percentage of cotton harvested by machines went from 5 percent in 1950 to 50 percent by 1960 and 95 percent by 1970, forcing farm laborers to flee to urban centers like Memphis or Atlanta to become the working or unemployed poor, or remain behind in unremitting rural poverty.
In the mid-1960s, even as the United States expanded voting rights and greater racial equality in the law, low wages and unemployment afflicted blacks at about three times the rate of whites. Many black families disintegrated. In the 1940s, factory employment and unionization had driven up black income relative to whites in the South, but in the South of the 1950s black income relative to whites went down by ten percentage points. The economist Charles Killingsworth wrote, “In the past decade changing technology and changing regional and industrial growth patterns have made opportunity far less equal for Negroes than it was a quarter century ago.” Clarence Coe, a United Rubber Workers Union member at the Firestone factory in Memphis, kept his job, protected by union seniority. But younger and sometimes better-educated black workers by the 1960s could find no such employment security. Industrial growth in the South exceeded that in the North, yet new jobs were increasingly nonunion, suburban, and given to whites. Conditions like these drove forward the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the ghetto rebellions. By undermining unions and paying black workers less, corporate leaders stole wealth from the black community; said Coe, “Those people have got some of my money in their pocket.” By the time of the Watts riot, black economic fortunes, on average, had declined for ten years.
Something else in the mid-1960s drove discussions of civil rights and economic justice: Goldwaterism had fired up the “New Right.” In the South, many whites switched from Democrat to Republican in the 1964 election. After that, the Republican Party began its march to southern dominance based on the politics of what the media called “white backlash.”
Outside the South equally powerful racial polarization emerged. California voters in a 1964 referendum overturned a state open-housing law. Many whites opposed school desegregation and feared competition for jobs and housing by African Americans and Latinos. In Detroit, white homeowners increasingly voted their fears, while unions and workers lost the battle against mechanization, job loss, and deunionization. Within the UAW, black workers demanded a seat at the union table but whites still overwhelmingly dominated union offices and skilled and supervisory jobs. Walter Reuther provided strong support for King and the civil rights movement but kept power within his union based on a white male anticommunist element hostile to black power within the union. Only about 4 percent of black workers in the auto industry held skilled jobs, even while they made up about a quarter of the work force in Detroit auto factories. Based in part on internal contradictions, the “heyday of liberalism” under UAW banners of labor solidarity began to wane and a movement of black workers and radicals began to challenge Reuther and labor liberals.
After Watts, what King saw was a shift to the right by a variety of conservative, libertarian, segregationist, procorporate, and antiunion forces—the very thing he had warned the AFL-CIO about in 1961. On September 18, 1965, Andrew Young represented King’s views at the District 65 union convention in New York City. “The explosion in Watts reminded us all that the northern ghettoes are the prisons of forgotten men,” said Young. Citing a black unemployment rate of 34 percent (and much higher for young black men), Watts demonstrated the need for “a shift in the focus of struggle,” one that “will not abate until the root causes are treated.” Speaking before some of King’s strongest labor friends, Young said unions had failed to provide enough support for civil rights in the South or for economic justice in the North.
On October 7, 1965, King urged the Illinois AFL-CIO to address the root cause of urban rebellions. He said civil rights “has profound moral appeal,” while “labor is stagnating and receding as a social force.” Further, he said, “Labor has been on the defensive for years,” as its “moral appeal flickers instead of shining as it did in the thirties.” The “destructive hurricane” of automation was “sweeping away jobs and work standards,” leaving behind nearly forty million poor people. Black workers had “moved from a decent standard of living to an essentially impoverished condition . . . identical with or worse than the depression thirties.” King predicted that “where there are millions of poor, organized labor cannot really be secure.”
“Nothing will be done until the issues are raised so dramatically that our nation will act. This was the lesson of both Selma and Birmingham,” said King. “It is not a constitutional right that men have jobs, but it is a human right.” How could anyone resolve the problem?
White workers with union wages feared the loss of their jobs and home values. No one wanted to give up their tenuous hold on the middle class. The only solution, King and others on the labor left concluded, was to do something for all workers. In October 1966, a booklet called “A Freedom Budget for All Americans,” with an introduction by King, was published by the A. Philip Randolph Institute, recently established with funding and support from the AFL-CIO, the Packinghouse Union, and others, with Bayard Rustin as its director. One hundred thousand copies were distributed. The “Freedom Budget” proposed a second New Deal to promote job growth at living wages through public spending on social goods. A “freedom budget,” the Randolph Institute said, “would not subtract from the income of anyone,” particularly whites, the largest demographic group among the poor. Rustin said social movements had so far failed to adequately coalesce around a class-based agenda to address the causes of both urban rebellions and the growing displacement of working-class people of all colors. A number of economists believed that economic growth would easily allow the government to pay for new programs to restore full employment, decent incomes to those who could not be employed, decent housing, educational opportunities, and medical care for all. Funding to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, housing, and schools would also create new jobs. The “Freedom Budget” was King’s answer to the zero-sum game of American capitalism.
King would use this platform in his fight for economic justice but with one exception: the Institute argued that it could create economic justice without disturbing American foreign policy and its escalating military spending. The AFL-CIO fully backed the war in Vietnam, but King saw military spending as a diversion of resources needed for economic development. On January 6, 1966, SNCC officially condemned that war as neocolonial aggression, and that view mirrored King’s. He saw the war as a moral evil and, on April 11, SCLC called on President Johnson to consider U.S. withdrawal. Johnson disparagingly dismissed critics as “nervous Nellies” and said worse things about them in private.
King and Bayard Rustin at this point did not agree on the way forward. In a February 1965 article in Commentary magazine, Rustin had argued that the movement should go “from Protest to Politics” through a labor and civil rights electoral coalition. King accepted the political coalition idea but still believed nonviolent resistance remained the most potent weapon of struggle. On November 13, 1965, King published an article in the Atlantic Monthly, “Beyond the Los Angeles Riots,” which proposed to take campaigns of nonviolent direct action into the centers of the black working-class crisis in the North. As he had with the Birmingham campaign, he picked the hardest nut to crack: Chicago. Rustin warned him, “You don’t know what Chicago is like. You’re going to get wiped out.”
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ON JANUARY 26, 1966, Martin and Coretta King moved their children into 1550 South Hamlin Avenue, in a Chicago slum neighborhood. “Its towering housing projects loomed like upright concentration camps, placing abject black poverty within sight of white opulence,” wrote Coretta. King came to Chicago hoping to use the Birmingham and Selma model in which a local campaign could dramatize issues and thereby change the national framework. “If we can break the backbone of discrimination in Chicago, we can do it in all the cities in the country,” King said. He still dreamed of a convergence of religious, labor, academic, and civil rights forces mobilizing to address urban problems through the Chicago Freedom Movement, using SCLC staff to join with preexisting organizations in the community. Chicago clearly demonstrated the intertwined crisis of the unemployed and the black working class. Some 700,000 African Americans lived in slums on the West and the South Side, while manufacturing jobs eroded, and 20 percent of Chicago’s black families lived below poverty. King sought to develop a mass movement that could dramatize the problems of segregated jobs, housing, and schools. He and his allies also tried to organize the youthful street gangs of Chicago into a political force to demand social and economic justice.
Over six months and more of intense campaigns, the Chicago movement brought the problems of the urban north to the attention of the nation. Chicago revealed howling mobs of white supremacists threatening King and marchers who demanded the end of segregated housing; real estate, insurance companies, and absentee landlords invested in segregation; craft unions that refused to open their doors to racial and ethnic minorities and women; the horrors of slum housing; the lack of infrastructure and transportation to get people to schools and jobs; the failure of the schools to educate, and the failure of legislatures to provide adequate funding; white bigotry, police brutality—and much more.
The Chicago Freedom Movement, with participation by black and white leaders in the packinghouse and others in unions, sought to address fair employment, job training, increased minimum wages, and other working-class issues. But the movement ran into a stone wall of resistance from craft unions vested in whites-only occupations. King and the CFM highlighted a range of economic issues through a classic civil rights campaign of mass rallies, marches, and escalating demonstrations. Some argued, however, that only in-depth community organizing could attack the intertwined issues in northern urban terrain. The CFM ultimately focused on demands to end housing segregation, with the hope that the Chicago movement could force national legislation, as other local campaigns had done.
The Chicago Freedom Movement targeted redlining by banks that would not give loans to African Americans, real estate company policies of screening blacks and Latinos out of white neighborhoods, and profiteering by flipping neighborhoods from white to black. Some organizers thought an open-housing strategy did not lend itself to a campaign for jobs in the ghetto: it could seem more like a campaign to get out of the ghetto that pitted inner-city blacks and Latinos against white working-class people of limited means and fearful of losing their home equity. Yet demands to open up housing had long been a major goal of the civil rights movement in Chicago. King and the Chicago Freedom Movement also initiated Operation Breadbasket, led by Jesse Jackson, which would successfully use the pressure of consumer economic boycott to demand and obtain jobs for African Americans from employers.
To complicate matters, however, on June 6 events in Mississippi interrupted King’s feverish efforts to build a mass community movement in Chicago. A white military veteran shot down civil rights activist James Meredith (he survived) as he attempted to walk from Memphis to Jackson in a March Against Fear. A white postal worker named William Moore had earlier been killed in Alabama when he tried to walk across the South for civil rights. King, Stokely Carmichael, James Lawson, and others now continued Meredith’s walk. On June 21, when he should have been in Chicago, King found himself in the small town of Philadelphia, in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where deputy sheriff Cecil Price had helped to murder SNCC’s Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney two years before. Some three hundred jeering whites surrounded King and Sheriff Price stood right behind King as he prayed, “We are here to save America. We are here to save you. Why don’t you whites understand this?” Angry whites threw cherry bombs while King tried to speak, and a mob with switchblades and rocks attacked marchers, who would later suffer from police attacks nearly as bad as marchers had endured in Selma. Mass-media sensationalism focused on Carmichael’s “Black Power” slogan to create a story of internal conflict that blocked out news that the actual movement, including both King and Carmichael, had shifted dramatically toward a “dual agenda” of racial and economic challenges to the deep institutionalized racism within the American capitalist system.
In between his trips to and from Mississippi, King in Chicago led the largest civil rights rally of 1966. On July 10, 30,000 people gathered at Soldier Field, and many marched through downtown to post their demands on the door of City Hall. Two hot summer nights later, riots erupted on the West Side in response to conflicts with the police. They lasted for three days, leaving two dead, four hundred arrested, and $2 million in property damage. A few days later, riots also broke out in Cleveland, Ohio. From July 30 to August 25 the movement’s open-housing demonstrations in Chicago suburbs of Gage Park and Cicero brought out ugly crowds of young white men wielding baseball bats, shouting “We want King!” Someone threw a rock and hit him in the head. George Lincoln Rockwell and his Nazi Party followers inflamed the crowds, openly sporting the Nazi insignia. King said the campaign for open housing created some of the most frightful scenes of white hatred he ever encountered, south or north.
White terror in both Chicago and Mississippi highlighted a problem with King’s efforts to build a civil rights–labor coalition for economic justice. In the Deep South white workers sometimes joined their class enemies in the White Citizen’s Councils, the KKK, and the John Birch Society, while in Chicago, open-housing demands faced a wall of fear from second-generation white ethnics. White craft-and-construction-trade unionists also put up a militant wall of opposition to minorities and women getting into the workforce. King and CFM leaders ultimately negotiated with Mayor Richard Daley and top city leaders, obtained some concessions, and hoped to win national legislation for open housing. But the mass media reported the Chicago campaign as a failure. King would later write, “We found ourselves confronted by the hard realities of a social system in many ways more resistant to change than the rural South.” Deindustrialization and other forces driving racial-economic conflict in the 1960s continued to spin out of control in Chicago, Detroit, and other urban centers in subsequent decades.
Instead of sensationalizing debates over the Black Power slogan, the media would have done better by focusing on the overriding problem that King tried to address: the lack of well-paying jobs. Generations of African American, Euro-American, and Latino workers had relied upon the steel industry and packinghouse and other manufacturing jobs to make their way to home ownership, higher education, and a better life. But between 1957 and 1966, Chicago workers lost tens of thousands of jobs. Packinghouse workers nationwide lost 38,000 jobs as mechanization of the meatpacking industry mixed with union busting undermined King’s ally, the United Packinghouse Workers Union, and forced it to merge with the craft-oriented amalgamated meat cutters and butcher workers’ union in 1968. King’s aide C. T. Vivian tried to open the door to more craft, construction, and public service jobs in Chicago, and worked with informal and union networks of black workers, including black bus drivers who led strikes in July and August 1968. They met fierce, militant opposition from unionized white workers in crafts and construction trades. Some criticized the Chicago Freedom Movement and King for not digging more deeply into the problems confronting black labor that continued to fuel racial injustice, but the problems they faced were immense.
Chicago illustrated the intertwined, hard-to-solve problems of economic and racial injustice and white worker opposition to black advances in the second phase of the freedom movement. Thomas Jackson writes that King saw race and class issues as intertwined parts of a “malignant kinship” that required changing the whole system of America’s racial capitalism. But how to do it?
Gandhi called his nonviolence campaigns “my experiments with truth,” and James Lawson said King viewed the Chicago campaign that way: as a learning experience that revealed the power of those seeking change, and the power of those lined up against it. SCLC organizers discovered what they were up against in trying to create a social movement that could address the problem of poverty and open up jobs, housing, transportation, education, and other social goods to people in the inner cities. In Chicago and beyond, historian Clayborne Carson wrote, King “was returning to his deepest convictions as a social gospel minister after a decade-long detour into civil rights leadership,” and “the most prophetic period of his life still lay ahead.”
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IN AUGUST 1966, at the tenth SCLC convention, held in August 1966, some nine hundred delegates focused their attention on economic justice. They reiterated SCLC’s support for repeal of 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act that encouraged right-to-work laws, and they demanded a $2 minimum wage and a guaranteed family income. Delegates heard King and A. Philip Randolph endorse the “Freedom Budget” for $100 billion over ten years to wipe out poverty, and heard RWDSU’s black union leader Cleveland Robinson and Bayard Rustin speak on behalf of a “labor–civil rights alliance” as the way forward. Expectations remained high for a new round of federal action to deal with institutionalized racism and poverty. The labor–civil rights coalition seemed intact.
In November 1966, however, a new kind of disaster hit: the Republican Party swept congressional elections, overshadowing the labor–civil rights coalition that had played such a powerful role in enacting legislation in 1964 and 1965. The Democrats lost more seats in the House in 1966 than Republicans had lost in the 1964 elections. Many of the seats won by liberals in 1964 now went back to conservatives. Working-class whites in districts near urban riots voted their fears. The election shattered hopes of major reform by both unions and the civil rights movement. In Memphis, as one example, the 1966 election replaced a relatively moderate Democratic congressman, George Grider, with a reactionary Republican named Dan Kuykendall and set the stage for a shift to the right in the city’s political establishment.
In the November 1966 issue of the AFL-CIO’s American Federationist, in an article titled “Civil Rights at the Crossroads,” Rustin argued that the “first phase” of the movement had produced a democratic revolution. But now that had to be followed primarily with electoral politics rather than campaigns of nonviolent resistance. He wrote that working-class whites “have only barely made it themselves,” and feared to lose their modestly priced homes and tenuous hold on jobs. However, the 1966 election returns now threw doubt on his optimistic view that a labor–civil rights coalition would win out through politics. In addition, the AFL-CIO and its member unions remained tightly wedded through the Democratic Party to the escalating war in Vietnam.
Most people in the New Left and antiwar movement saw unions and the Democrats as part of the problem. The Black Panther Party, formed in Oakland, California, in the summer of 1966, formulated a ten-point program that demanded housing, health care, jobs, withdrawal of African Americans drafted for the Vietnam War, an end to police brutality and mass incarceration. These were King’s demands as well, but expressed in a more inflammatory tone and calling for a movement of armed self-defense. By 1967, vast numbers of people were fighting for social change but their means differed, and they all confronted a stone wall of war spending, escalating police violence, racism, and deep social ills.
King said it was now “the most difficult phase of the civil rights struggle.” Following the election of the full-blown racist Lester Maddox as governor of Georgia in the 1966 election, King feared, “We could end up with a full scale race war in this country. It is very frightening.”