Portside

Readers comments: CPI, Grand Bargain, Social Security Cuts; Labor Party Time?; Whither the Socialist Left; Plan B; Thatcher - Reality & Myth; Incredibly Angry Songs About Iron Lady; Forgotten Radical History of March on Washington; Medi-Cal interpreters; How Maggots Heal; Announcements - Two events with Angela Davis - Berkeley - Apr 17; Los Angeles - Apr 19; May Day 2013 - New York; The Labor Film Database In Memoriam: Harry Kelber; Philip Bonosky (memorial Apr 21)

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which occurred fifty years ago this August 28, remains one of the most successful mobilizations ever created by the American Left. Organized by a coalition of trade unionists, civil rights activists, and feminists—most of them African American and nearly all of them socialists—the protest drew nearly a quarter-million people to the nation’s capital. Yet the Left has not claimed the March as its legacy.

It is barely remembered that the March was for freedom and jobs. The demand for jobs was not a throwaway line in order to get trade union support but instead reflected the growing economic crisis affecting the Black worker