William P. Jones is a professor of history at University of Minnesota. He is the author of The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights and The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South.
The famous Operation Dixie campaign to unionize the South in the 1940s was mostly unsuccessful. Still, it left a positive mark on American society. It’s even possible that the civil rights movement wouldn’t have staged the March on Washington without it.
The March on Washington was 59 years ago today. It’s popularly remembered as a moderate demonstration where MLK “had a dream” — but in fact, it was the decades-long culmination of a mass, working-class movement against racial and economic injustice.
Unlike many in his party, Eugene V. Debs believed the struggle for black equality was critical to realizing the promise of socialism.