Recently, I had the pleasure of reviewing for The Nation a book by Sylvie Laurent, King and the Other America. In that book, Laurent made an argument for Martin Luther King, Jr. being part of a longer tradition in American—and African American—history of social democratic protest, debate, and thought. In my review, I attempted to further tie these ideas together with the current historiography of the Black freedom movement. However, the book and the process of writing the review caused me to think harder about what a full history of a Black Social Democratic tradition would look like.
Of course, it’s important to think of how this tradition both speaks to, and sometimes conflicts with, the Black Radical Tradition that Cedric Robinson famously proposed—and so many other scholars have chimed in on in the decades since Robinson’s book was published. In this Black Social Democratic Tradition, what I’m proposing here is that it pushes and pulls against the contours of “mainstream” American political and intellectual traditions. Where the Black Radical Tradition asks for a fundamental change to American, and Western, society, the Black Social Democratic Tradition is a bit more comfortable within those traditional ideas. But, nonetheless, it presents a unique challenge to mainstream political and intellectual thought.
African Americans have long considered what social democracy in America could look like. The mid-1960s offers a fascinating example of this. Negro Digest published in February 1965 an essay that tried to argue for the need to understand the greatness of African American leaders during Reconstruction. Raymond Pace Alexander, then a Judge for the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia (the first African American to do so), argued “Cultural democracy is an important, inescapable corollary of political and social democracy and it involves an open door and the full acceptance of minority contributions and for the full recognition of the minority contributors.” For Judge Alexander, it was critical to understand the full history of the United States and to guarantee full rights for all in the present—both necessary parts of a vibrant social and political democracy.[1]
Bayard Rustin stands out as an important figure in any potential history of African American Social Democracy. His own transition from stalwart radical to urging participation the mainstream of the Democratic Party is an example of how this Social Democratic Tradition reckons with the two-party system of American politics in ways that potentially put it in conflict with the Black Radical Tradition. The fight for civil and economic freedom that formed a key part of Rustin’s life conflicted with his stance on the Vietnam War in the 1960s—to the point that even the “Freedom Budget” that he and other Black leaders (including Dr. King and A. Philip Randolph) backed left out any mention of Vietnam. Today, left-wing scholars and activists praise some of Rustin’s tactics and broad strategies as they related to the Civil Rights era, but also criticize him for what were, in their eyes, these and other foreign policy failings.
Much is left to be done about the ways in which African American intellectual and social thought shaped the United States throughout its history. We can see examples of this tradition through civil rights campaigns linking together racial and economic democracy during the New Deal and World War II periods, or in Jesse Jackson’s campaigns for president in the 1980s. Capturing some of the tension between different strains of those ideologies will be key to not only grappling with these debates in the past but understanding African American thought today. This is a question I’ll be considering more in my coming blog posts.
[1] Judge Raymond Pace Alexander, “Of History and Heresy,” Negro Digest, February 1965, p. 63.
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