At the height of the civil rights movement, five organizations dominated the struggle for racial justice: Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Urban League, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Following the great legal victories of the movement—the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights of 1965—the leaders of the Big Five came together to support an ambitious 1966 program, analogous to a domestic Marshall Plan, named A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans. Coauthored by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, and supported by the presidents of key labor unions including the United Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers of America, prominent Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders, and eminent intellectuals such as John Kenneth Galbraith, David Riesman, and Daniel Bell, it brought together a broad coalition in support of a plan calling for the total elimination of poverty by 1975.
But the Freedom Budget was far more than a plan to help the poor. Alongside its assault on poverty, it proposed a multi-pronged program, including full employment, a massive public housing initiative, expanded investment in education job training, a nationwide and universal system of health insurance, and a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans. Well aware that a program of this magnitude would disproportionately help black Americans who were concentrated in the lower runs of America’s social structure, the authors of the Freedom Budget emphasized that a clear majority of America’s poor and unemployed were white. In his introduction to a summary version of the Freedom Budget, A. Philip Randolph, the great elder statesman of the civil rights movement who had inspired the 1963 March on Washington, wrote of “the tragedy…that the workings of our economy so often pitted the white poor and the black poor against each other at the bottom of society.” Only a coalition bringing together all races, argued Randolph and Martin Luther King, who wrote the Foreword to A Freedom Budget for All Americans, could generate the political pressure necessary to make the Freedom Budget a reality.