The Racial Wealth Gap Will Persist Until Neoliberalism and Its Peddlers Are Defeated
For the leaders of the fight for racial equality throughout the twentieth century, anti-discrimination and anti-capitalism went hand in hand; the struggle for economic justice was always viewed as integral to and inseparable from the struggle for racial justice.
"Our needs are identical with labor's needs — decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community," Martin Luther King Jr. said at an AFL-CIO convention in 1961, expressing the prevailing sentiment among the socialist leaders of the civil rights movement.
Bayard Rustin, the key organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, emphasized the importance of organized labor in advancing the rights and material conditions of black Americans in a 1971 essay, in which he asserted both the centrality of unions and the need for a radical approach to inequality.
He urged that "only a program that would effect some fundamental change in the distribution of America's resources for those in greatest need of them" would be enough "to meet the present crisis."
And "a program truly, not merely verbally, radical in scope" could only be achieved with the backing of that "one social force which, by virtue both of its size and its very nature, is essential to the creation of such a majority — and so in relation to which the success or failure of the black struggle must finally turn. And that is the American trade union movement."