Valeria
Sinclair-Chapman
Department of
Political Science
Purdue University
101 N. University
Street
West Lafayette, IN
47907
Harry Targ
Department of
Political Science
Purdue University
Paper prepared for presentation at the annual
meeting of the Global Studies Association, June 6-8, 2018, Howard University
School of Law, Washington, D.C..
Abstract
This paper examines a model of fusion politics
that connects activism to end poverty and address a constellation of social
injustices across more than a half century in the United States. We consider an articulation of fusion
politics that highlights the actions of disparate groups and individuals,
including youth, racial and ethnic minorities, women, LGBT activists, teachers,
and union members who have joined in a cooperative effort to address
independent but linked concerns such as quality public schools, livable wages,
affordable healthcare, environmental justice, immigrant rights, women’s
reproductive rights, fair elections, and criminal justice. Our analysis points out the historical links
between the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, the Rainbow Coalition of the 1980s,
and the new Poor People’s Campaign launched in 2018. It draws heavily on the words and writings of
King and the Reverend William Barber, II in understanding the organizing,
objectives, and transformative potential of these movements.
Introduction
The new Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) launched
with rallies and demonstrations across the country on Mother’s Day 2018. It is not coincidental that 2018 marks the 50th
anniversary of the original 1968 PPC organized by Martin Luther King, Jr., and
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
After the gains of the civil rights movement evidenced in the passage of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King was struck
by limited effect that these monumental changes to American law had on the
everyday lives of black people across the U.S., and particularly in America’s
urban slums. In the period following the
1965 Watts riot, King moved with his family to a Chicago tenement to help
coordinate new efforts challenging discriminatory housing and hiring practices
outside the south.
Following the long,
hot summer of 1967, a period during which young people and others took to the
streets in an angry response to black unemployment, racial discrimination, and
police brutality in more than 150 American cities, King began to recognize the
limits of a series of isolated campaigns to address a constellation of problems
plaguing black Americans. What was
required was a nationally coordinated response, a national response to the
conditions confronting black people whose hopes had been raised by the
successes of the civil rights movement, but whose everyday circumstances had
largely remained unchanged. It is in
this arena that King began to articulate a framework uncovering the mutually
constitutive –isms of racism, materialism, and militarism.
King’s assassination in April of 1968 makes it
impossible to know what might have come of the PPC had its charismatic and
visionary lived. As it stands, Rev.
Ralph Abernathy, King’s wife Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson and others
continued to organize the PPC’s March on Washington and the Resurrection City
encampment on the National Mall. As King
and others pointed out, poverty knew no color, nor age, nor state or regional boundary. Resurrection City was to remain encamped on
the National Mall until the federal government redirected attention and federal
resources to alleviate poverty, provide an income floor, and expand public
sector employment in a jobs program.
What Barber refers to as “fusion politics” is a three-pronged notion
about the connectedness of people, organizations, and issues that can drive
change on a national scale in the United States. Then, as is the case now,
fusion politics, or the idea that a sustained multiracial coalition of
antipoverty, antiracist, and antiwar activists could help refocus American
policy and redirect resources to address a concern that affected our common
well-being, was a central tenet of the PPC.
Our paper aims to discuss the development of a fusion-based approach to
organizing, why and how fusion is viewed by organizers as an important factor,
and under what circumstances fusion is likely to contribute to the success of a
movement.
In
what follows, we describe various incarnations of fusion politics, first using
King’s famous speech at Riverside Church in Harlem, NY in 1967 as a framing
device. We then apply this vision to
organizing across groups, individuals, issues, and time from sanitation
workers, to the Black Power Movement, to the Fight for $15. We conclude with a discussion of the
constraints and opportunities that confront the modern PPC.
Dr. King and the Three Evils: The Articulation
of a Fusion Politics Vision
Dr. Martin Luther King, in his famous speech
at Riverside Church in New York City, spoke of the devastating consequences of
the Vietnam War on the Vietnamese people and the poor and oppressed at home. To
him, the carnage of war not only destroyed the targets of war (their economies,
their land, their cultures) but the costs also misallocated the resources of
the nation-states which initiated wars.
Every health and welfare provision of the
government, local, state, and federal, was limited by resources allocated for
the war system. Health care, education, transportation, jobs, wages, campaigns
to address enduring problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental
revitalization, and non-war related scientific and technological research were
reduced almost in direct proportion to rising military expenditures. Over half
the US federal budget goes to military spending past and current. And
the irony is that the money that is extracted from the vast majority of the
population of the United States goes to military budgets that enhance the
profits of the less than one percent of the population who profit from the war
system as it exists.
“I speak for the poor of America who are
paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in
Vietnam.” Since 1967 when he made that speech, Dr. King would surely have added
a long list of other wars to the Vietnam case: wars in Central America and
South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. and the more than 1,000 bases
and outposts where US troops or hired contractors are fighting wars on behalf
of capitalist expansion. Meanwhile the gaps between rich and poor people on a
worldwide basis have increased dramatically with some twenty percent of the
world’s population living below World Bank defined poverty lines.
Dr.
King Building Fusion: A Labor/Civil Rights Alliance
Dr.
King arrived in Memphis on March 18, 1968 to support the sanitation workers of
that city who had been on strike for five weeks. These workers had many
grievances that forced them to protest. Garbage workers had no access to
bathroom or shower facilities. They were not issued any protective clothing for
their job. There were no eating areas separate from garbage. Sanitation workers
had no pension or retirement program and no entitlement to workers
compensation. Their wages were very low. Shortly before the strike began two
workers died on the job and the families of the deceased received only $500 in
compensation from the city. Finally, after Black workers were sent home for the
day because of bad weather and received only two hours pay they walked off the
job.
On
March 28, ten days after King arrived, violence disrupted a march led by him.
He left the city but returned on April 4 to lead a second march. On that
fateful April day, King told Jerry Wurf, president of the American Federation
of State, County, and Municipal Employees or AFSCME: "What is going on
here in Memphis is important to every poor working man, black or white, in the
South." That evening Martin Luther King was killed by a sniper's bullet.
It
was logical for King to be in Memphis to support garbage workers. Despite a
sometimes rocky relationship between the civil rights and labor movements, King
knew that black and white workers' struggles for economic justice were
indivisible; that civil rights could not be realized in a society where great
differences in wealth and income existed, and where life expectancies,
educational opportunities, and the quality of jobs varied by class, by race,
and by gender. The more progressive and far-sighted leaders and rank-and-file
union members in the AFL-CIO knew it too. At the time of King's death working
people were coming together to struggle for positive social change around the
banner of the Poor People's Campaign.
Dr.
King's thinking on the need for an alliance between the civil rights and labor
movements was expressed many times. As far back as 1957 at a convention of the
United Packinghouse Workers of American (UPWA) he asserted that "organized
labor can be one of the most powerful instruments in putting an end to
discrimination and segregation."
During
an organizing effort of the Hospital Workers Local 1199 in the fall of 1964,
King was a featured speaker at a fundraising rally. He said of the 1199
struggle," Your great organizing crusade to win union and human rights for
New Jersey hospital workers is part and parcel of the struggle we are
conducting in the Deep South. I want to congratulate your union for charting a
road for all labor to follow-dedication to the cause of the underpaid and
exploited workers in our nation." Shortly after, Dr. King left a picket
line of Newark hospital workers on strike to fly to Oslo, Norway to receive the
Nobel Prize.
Upon
his return from Norway, King returned to the picket line; this time in support
of Black women workers of the Chemical Workers union at the Scripto Pen Plant
in Atlanta. He said there: "Along with the struggle to desegregate, we
must engage in the struggle for better jobs. The same system that exploits the
Negro exploits the poor white..."
At
the Negro American Labor Council convention of June, 1965 King called for a new
movement to achieve "a better distribution of wealth within this country
for all of God's children." In February 1966, King spoke to Chicago labor
leaders during his crusade for the end to racism and poverty in that city. He
called on the labor movement which had provided techniques and methods, and
financial support crucial to civil rights victories to join in the war on
poverty and slums in Chicago. Such an effort in Chicago, he said, would show
that a Black and labor alliance could be of relevance to solving nationwide
problems of unemployment, poverty, and automation.
One
year before his death, King spoke at another meeting of Hospital Workers 1199.
He said a closer alliance was needed between labor and civil rights activists
to achieve the "more difficult" task of economic equality. The civil
rights movement and its allies were moving into a new phase to achieve economic
justice, he announced. This would be a more formidable struggle since it was in
his words "much more difficult to eradicate a slum than it is to integrate
a bus."
In
early 1968, Dr. King incorporated his opposition to the Vietnam War with his
commitment to economic justice. He called for an end to the War and the
utilization of societal resources to eliminate poverty. To those ends the Poor
People's Campaign was launched. It demanded jobs, a guaranteed annual income
for those who could not find work, the construction of 6 million new homes,
support for employment in rural areas, new schools to train jobless youth for
skilled work, and other measures to end poverty.
While
preparing the Poor People's Campaign, King got a call to go to Memphis. Before
leaving he sent a message to be read at the seventh annual convention of the
Negro American Labor Council. He wrote that the Council represented "the
embodiment of two great traditions in our nation's history: the best tradition
of the organized labor movement and the finest tradition of the Negro Freedom
Movement." He urged a black-labor alliance to unite the Black masses and
organized labor in a campaign to help solve the "deteriorating economic
and social conditions of the Negro community... heavily burdened with both
unemployment and underemployment, flagrant job discrimination, and the
injustice of unequal education opportunity."
Michael
Honey demonstrates that Dr. King’s vision of fundamental change evolved over
his long career of political activism. But Honey suggests, King always saw the
struggle for desegregation and voter rights as just part of a historic battle
to achieve full economic and social equality. He refers to King’s vision of
building “civil rights unionism,” an alliance of Black and white workers to
achieve the twin pillars of a just society: racial justice and worker rights.
The SCLC had long and close ties with the sleeping car porters, packinghouse
workers, public sector workers, autoworkers, and steel workers. His ties to
socialist currents were strong.
Memphis
represented the culmination of the civil rights unionism, demands to end
poverty, and the effort to fuse the interests of trade unionists, poor and
marginalized men and women, and people of color in one struggle. With the
weakening of the organized labor movement by 1968, the rise of racism inspired
by politicians like George Wallace, a renewed and virulent anti-communism, a
fusion politics was required that would organize millions of people struggling
against racism, poverty, and war. As Honey described it:
“These conditions undermined fhe unions
and King’s power base, as we so well know today. That is why King moved on to
the Poor People’s Campaign framework, which was to organize the unemployed poor
and the working poor in a multi-racial coalition to demand the government spend
money for jobs, health care, education and housing instead of spending for war
and to benefit the wealthy and white.” Michael Honey interview, “MLK: To the
Promised Land,” Solidarity,
(http://solidarity-us.org/atc)
Fifty
years later the social and economic injustices of which Dr. King spoke
continue. But so does his vision of a working class movement united in struggle
to survive, a movement of Blacks, whites and Latinos, men and women, young and
old, and organized and unorganized workers. The times have changed but the
importance of Dr King's political vision remains.
Another Kind of Fusion: The Black Panther
Party and Rainbow Coalitions
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!
(From Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America
Again,” 1938)
In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, founded
the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The Party inspired African American
and white leftists who were beginning to see capitalist exploitation and racism
as central to the American experience. The BPP saw the need for Black people to
organize to defend their communities; to develop a theory that would help Black
people understand their subordinate condition; to construct institutions,
particularly health care, education, and food distribution, to serve the people;
and to act in solidarity with liberation struggles on a worldwide basis. To
articulate its goals the BPP wrote a 10-point program that would serve as a
guide to programs and action for party members (collectiveliberation.org).
The BPP program included demands for community
control, access to “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and
peace,” and an end to police violence and mass incarceration of Black people.
In each issue of The Black Panther newspaper, all 537 of them, the
platform was printed. The dramatic escalation of state violence against the BPP
and the Black community in general by the FBI and local law enforcement
agencies testified to the fact that the Panther program resonated in urban
communities around the country, particularly among the young.
The Party encouraged grassroots activism and
community control basing its appeal on the idea that it would serve the needs
of the people. Establishing free breakfast programs for children, health
clinics, and education, had enormous appeal. With growing violence against the
community by the police the BPP advocated collective self-defense.
After the police dispersed Resurrection City,
the Poor People’s lodging on the Mall in Washington D.C. and the police riot at
the Democratic Convention in Chicago, a group of Black, Brown, and White youth
organized what would become the first Rainbow Coalition. The campaign was
initiated by young leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party Fred Hampton.
Jakobi E. Williams, (“The Original Rainbow
Coalition: An Example of Universal Identity Politics,” Tikkun, 2003, https://www.tikkun
.org/nextgen/the-original-rainbow-coalition-an-example-of-univeersal-identity-politics)
describes the coming together of Black, Brown, white youth, men and women
around an anti-poverty agenda, that was avowedly anti-capitalist. He argues
that the Panthers, the Young Lords, The Young Patriotism, and other groups came
together maintaining their identities and at the same time recognizing what
interests they had in common. While police repression defused the Original
Rainbow Coalition, Williams suggests that the idea of the Rainbow was
appropriated by the mayoral candidacy of Harold Washington and the presidential
campaigns of Jesse Jackson. Williams believes that while the idea of the
Rainbow resonated with politicians and constituents, its vision and ideology
was not quite as radical as the original. Even so, Rev. Jackson and later Senator Bernie Sanders used the idea of the Rainbow to build large, movements for social change in the electoral area in the 1980s and beyond.
For the purpose of suggesting continuities in
the idea of fusion over time, the recognition of the Original Rainbow Coalition
is important. As Williams writes:
“The original Rainbow Coalition embodied the
intersectionality of the critical issues of race, class, gender, anti-war,
student, labor, and sexuality. It fused these various forms of identity
politics into one group with one ideal form of identity—an identity that
transcends differences and focuses on commonalities. The most common unifier
was poverty.”
The Emergence of Moral Mondays in the South
Moral Mondays refers to a burgeoning mass movement that had
its roots in efforts to defend voter rights in North Carolina. Thousands of
activists have been mobilizing across the South over the last year inspired by
Moral Mondays. They are fighting back against draconian efforts to destroy the
right of people to vote, workers’ and women’s rights, and for progressive
policies in general. Paradoxically, many progressives in the South and
elsewhere have not heard of this budding movement.
Moral Mondays began as the annual Historic Thousands on
Jones Street People's Assembly (HKonJ) in 2006 to promote progressive politics
in North Carolina. Originally a coalition of 16 organizations, initiated by the
state’s NAACP, it has grown to include 150 organizations today promoting a
multi-issue agenda. In 2006, its task was to pressure the state’s Democratic
politicians to expand voting rights and support progressive legislation on a
variety of fronts.
With the election of a tea-party government in that state in
2012, the thrust of Moral Mondays shifted to challenging the draconian policies
threatening to turn back gains made by people of color, workers, women,
environmentalists and others. Public protests at the state house weekly in the
spring of 2013 during the state legislative session led to over 1,000 arrests
for civil disobedience and hundreds of thousands of hits on MM websites.
Similar movements have spread throughout the South (Georgia, South Carolina,
and Florida) and in some states in the Midwest and Southwest (Wisconsin,
Pennsylvania, and Missouri).
To kick off the spring 2014 protests, MM organizers called a
rally in Raleigh, North Carolina on February 8 which brought out at least
80,000 protestors. Rev. William Barber, a key organizer of the movement, has
grounded this new movement in history, suggesting that the South is in the
midst of the “third reconstruction.” The first reconstruction, after the Civil
War, consisted of Black and white workers struggling to create a democratic
South (which would have impacted on the North as well). They elected legislators
who wrote new state constitutions to create democratic institutions in that
region for the first time. This first reconstruction was destroyed by white
racism and the establishment of Jim Crow segregation.
The second reconstruction occurred between Brown vs. Board
of Education in 1954 and President Nixon’s 1968 “Southern Strategy.” During
this period formal segregation was overturned, Medicare and Medicaid were
established, and Social Security was expanded. Blacks and whites benefited. Dr.
King’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign envisioned a defense and expansion of the
Second Reconstruction.
Now we are in the midst of a third reconstruction, according
to Barber. Political mobilizations today, like those of the first
reconstruction, are based on what was called in the 1860s “fusion” politics;
that is bringing all activists—Black, Brown, white, gay/straight, workers,
environmentalists—together. Fusion politics assumes that only a mass movement
built on everyone’s issues can challenge the billionaire economic elites such
as the Koch brothers and their Wall Street collaborators with masses of people
(the 99 percent). Fusion politics, he says, requires an understanding of the
fact that every issue is interconnected causally with every other issue.
Therefore, democracy, civil rights, labor, women’s, gay/lesbian, and
environmental movements must act together (http://youtu.be/sOMn8jLjVLE).
At the February action in Raleigh, five general demands were
articulated as guides for their spring activism. While economic, political, and
historical forces vary from state to state the demands can serve as a model for
action elsewhere as well. The North Carolina demands are:
- Secure pro-labor,
anti-poverty policies that insure economic sustainability;
- Provide well-funded, quality
public education for all;
- Stand up for the health of
every North Carolinian by promoting health care access and environmental
justice across all the state's communities;
- Address the continuing
inequalities in the criminal justice system and ensure equality under the
law for every person, regardless of race, class, creed, documentation or
sexual preference;
- Protect and expand voting
rights for people of color, women, immigrants, the elderly and students to
safeguard fair democratic representation.
The Twenty-First Century Poor People’s
Campaign
The twenty-first century Poor People’s Campaign, around which Barber and Liz
Theoharis of the Kairos Center are organizing, takes the Moral Mondays campaign
to another level. Moral Mondays was about state level issues. It concentrated
on domestic policy. It awakened progressives to the critical idea that most of
the anti-people policies of the last decade supported by reactionary
billionaires like the Koch Brothers, were instituted at the state level.
Therefore, Moral Mondays began, appropriately, as a series of state campaigns.
Now, Barber suggests, there is a need to take the struggle to the entire
nation. Local, national, and international issues are connected. Anti-racist,
antisexist, anti-worker policies at the state level are connected to similar developments
at the national level. AND, all these issues have global dimensions as well.
This new necessity led naturally to
reflections on the last project initiated by Dr. Martin Luther King in the
spring of 1968, a Poor People’s Campaign. This was a national campaign
organized by and for the poor in America, today representing about 40 percent
of the population. The specific program was to organize a
march/rally/occupation of Washington D.C. to demand an end to poverty in
America. Dr. King, in his famous speech at Riverside Church one year earlier
articulated the fundamental interconnections, the fusion, of three primary
structural problems in America: poverty, racism, and militarism.
Sixty years later, Reverend Barber is calling
on progressives to join in a common struggle, led by the poor and oppressed, to
challenge these three evils. Rev. Barber, therefore, has been traveling across
the United States beginning a conversation about and training for a 2018 Poor
People’s Campaign. He is calling upon 1,000 people from each of 25 states and
the District of Columbia to commit to train for and engage in civil
disobedience to bring the triad of evils to the attention of the public. And
he emphasizes repeatedly that the campaign is not just about changing attitudes
but changing institutions and policies.
The optics of the rally at the Saint Gabriel’s
Church of God reflected the movement Reverend Barber is building. Attendees
were Black and white, young and old, women and men, and religious and secular.
As to the latter point Barber cited scripture for the religious and the better
parts of the US constitution for the secularists.
Finally, Reverend Barber's speech on August 28
emphasized that there cannot be freedom without equality. There cannot be human
rights without access to health care and education. And there cannot be
economic justice at home while there is militarism overseas.
The twenty-first century Poor People’s Campaign grounds today’s
struggles in history; links democracy to economic change; connects social and
economic justice; and connects a humane future in the United States to an end
to war and the preparation for war. As Barber has written:
The fights for racial and economic equality are as inseparable today as they
were half a century ago. Make no mistake about it: We face a crisis in America.
The twin forces of white supremacy and unchecked corporate greed have gained
newfound power and influence, both in statehouses across this nation and at the
highest levels of our federal government. Sixty-four million Americans make
less than a living wage, while millions of children and adults continue to live
without access to healthcare, even as extremist Republicans in Congress
threaten to strip access away from millions more. As our social fabric is
stretched thin by widening income inequality, politicians criminalize the poor,
fan the flames of racism and xenophobia to divide the poor, and steal from the
poor to give tax breaks to our richest neighbors and budget increases to a
bloated military. (William J. Barber
II, “Rev. Barber: America Needs a New Poor People’s Campaign,” ThinkProgress,
May 15, 2017.)
Assessing Fusion Politics and Multiracial
Unity: Critical Reflections and Hopes
for the Future
If history is any guide, the
prospects for success of a fusion politics model of organizing to end poverty,
racism, and war are promising, but mixed.
America’s history of racism and racial distrust is a consistent threat
to the potential of a sustained multiracial coalition. As was the case more than 100 years ago in
1890s North Carolina, coalitions of poor whites and blacks, and now poor and
marginalized people from myriad backgrounds, are at risk of coalition-raiding
strategies that promise rewards to one group at the expense of others, making
multiracial coalitions fragile and short-lived (Hamilton and Ture 1967).
Scalability is another challenge
confronting the new PPC. Can 1,000
people in every state scale up into a movement of thousands or millions as
would be necessary to capture the attention of the nation, particularly in
Trump’s America? The constant threat of
state repression and violence that comes with the mobilization of what Jesse
Jackson called the “locked-out” people during the height of the Rainbow
Coalition could fracture and undermine the movement, scatter activists, and
dampen momentum. The new PPC depends upon what appears to be a long-term
strategy of organization building in states and across the nation. History demonstrates that such a process
could take years, decades, or even generations to build. In the absence of
short-term policy or electoral wins, maintaining coalitions may very well
become difficult. Finally, if governments at various levels simply ignore the
actions of fusion organizers in favor of wealthy interests (see MacLean 2017),
the effects of grassroots organizing may be very limited or nonexistent.
That
Americans seem to return to fusion organizing over and over across time signals
a hopefulness about movements that extol us to “move forward together,” as did
Barber’s Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina. A mass movement built on the fusion of people
from diverse backgrounds, organizations with varied missions and
constituencies, and interconnected issues may be the only practical approach to
counter the vast material resources of conservative wealthy elites. The viability and sustainability of such an
approach against such a well-resourced and entrenched opposition remain to be
seen.
And Reverend Barber remembers Jesse Jackson.
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/2/18/jesse_jackson_william_barber_tribute_death
