A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin’s Freedom Budget is the key to understanding the appeal of the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor. The class-based universalistic politics of the socialists of the 60s and ’70s hold important lessons for today.
Netflix’s new feel-good Bayard Rustin biopic, Rustin, claims the civil rights hero has been forgotten because of his sexuality. But it was his fiery and provocative class politics that makes him both controversial and prophetic today.
You owe it to yourself to see the original, not the biopic.
August 28th was the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. Ignore the lies and distortions — the reality, as the latest research shows, is that scores of socialists influenced or were themselves key figures in the civil rights movement.
Affirmative action is now a policy of the past. Something far more powerful than affirmative action is still needed. The vision of Randolph, Rustin and King offers a clue towards a solutions.
James Campbell worked in the civil rights movement with Jack O’Dell, Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X and Bob Moses; in the theater and contributed to the influential Freedomways journal co-founded by W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois. Now at 95, a tribute.
We are in a time when there is a tremendous sense of movement for a more just nation and world. The question that has to be answered if this protest movement is not to be marginalized is this: “What are the people power vehicles we are building?"
Reader Comments: Zika Virus-Puerto Rico; Brussels Attacks; Elizabeth Warren; Bayard Rustin - from those who knew him; Letters from Langston; Dr. Quentin Young; Trump's Ideology of Violence and Working-Class Appeal; How Black Youth Helped Unseat Anita Alvarez; Demonstrating Against Trump; Future of Education-Colleges as Investments; Community Colleges;
Announcements: Labor Notes Conference; Webinar: TPP is a feminist issue; 80th Annual Celebration Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Black History Month is a time for looking back on the civil rights movement and the lives of its pioneers. One of them was a man whose name is far less widely known than those of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks or James Farmer. He was Bayard Rustin, whom some have sought to celebrate in recent years as an unsung hero of the movement, one who never received his due recognition because he was gay.
Book Review: A Freedom Budget for All Americans, By Paul LeBlanc and Michael D. Yates; New York: Monthly Review Press
Spread the word