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michael harrington
Martin Luther King Was a Radical, Not a Saint
“For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”
Jan 20, 2019
It is easy to forget that in his day, in his own country, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was considered a dangerous radical. He was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media. The establishment's campaign to denigrate King worked. In August 1966 - two years after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at age 35--the Gallup Poll found that 63 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King, compared with 33 percent who viewed him favorably.
Today Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is viewed as something of an American saint. The most recent Gallup Poll discovered that 94 percent of Americans viewed him in a positive light. His birthday is a national holiday. His name adorns schools and street signs. Americans from across the political spectrum invoke King's name to justify their beliefs and actions.
He opposed US militarism and imperialism, especially the country's misadventure in Vietnam.
In fact, King was a radical. He believed that America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power." He challenged America's class system and its racial caste system. He was a strong ally of the nation's labor union movement. He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike. He opposed US militarism and imperialism, especially the country's misadventure in Vietnam.
If he were alive today, he would certainly be standing with Walmart employees and other workers fighting for a living wage and the right to unionize. He would be on the picket lines with striking school teachers, demanding smaller class sizes and more resources for schools so that every student can have a first-rate education. He would be in the forefront of the battle for strong gun controls and to thwart the influence of the National Rifle Association. He would protest the abuses of Wall Street banks, standing side-by-side with homeowners facing foreclosure and crusading for tougher regulations against lending rip-offs.
As he did in his own day, King would be calling for dramatic cuts in the military budget to reinvest public dollars in jobs, education and health care. He would surely be marching with immigrants and their allies in support of comprehensive immigration reform. He would no doubt travel to the US-Mexico border to protest the mistreatment of children and their parents seeking asylum and refuge. He would be joining hands with activists seeking to reduce racial profiling by police and ending the mass incarceration of young people. Like most Americans in his day, King was homophobic, even though one of his closest advisors, Bayard Rustin, was gay. But today, King would undoubtedly stand with advocates of LGBT rights and same-sex marriage, just as he challenged state laws banning interracial marriage. We don't know what King's views were on abortion, but in 1966, he was pleased to receive Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger Award in Human Rights. Accepting the award, he wrote: "There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. ... Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision."
King began his activism in Montgomery as a crusader against racial segregation, but the struggle for civil rights radicalized him into a fighter for broader economic and social justice and peace.
Indeed, King's views evolved over time. He entered the public stage with some hesitation, reluctantly becoming the spokesperson for the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, at the age of 26. King began his activism in Montgomery as a crusader against racial segregation, but the struggle for civil rights radicalized him into a fighter for broader economic and social justice and peace. Still, in reviewing King's life, we can see that the seeds of his later radicalism were planted early.
King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, the son of a prominent black minister. Despite growing up in a solidly middle-class family, King saw the widespread human suffering caused by the Depression, particularly in the black community. In 1950, while in graduate school, he wrote an essay describing the "anticapitalistic feelings" he experienced as a youngster as a result of seeing unemployed people standing in breadlines.
During King's first year at Morehouse College, civil rights and labor activist A. Philip Randolph spoke on campus. Randolph predicted that the near future would witness a global struggle that would end white supremacy and capitalism. He urged the students to link up with "the people in the shacks and the hovels," who, although "poor in property," were "rich in spirit."
After graduating from Morehouse in 1948, King studied theology at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania (where he read both Mohandas Gandhi and Karl Marx), planning to follow in his father's footsteps and join the ministry. In 1955, he earned his doctorate from Boston University, where he studied the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, the influential liberal theologian. While in Boston, he told his girlfriend (and future wife), Coretta Scott, that "a society based on making all the money you can and ignoring people's needs is wrong."
When King moved to Montgomery to take his first pulpit at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he was full of ideas but had no practical experience in politics or activism. But history sneaked up on him. On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and veteran activist with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), decided to resist the city's segregation law by refusing to move to the back of the bus on her way home from work. She was arrested. Two other long-term activists in the black community - E. D. Nixon (leader of the NAACP and of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) and Jo Ann Robinson (a professor at the all-black Alabama State College and a leader of Montgomery's Women's Political Council) - determined that Parks' arrest was a ripe opportunity for a one-day boycott of the much-despised segregated bus system. Nixon and Robinson asked black ministers to use their Sunday sermons to spread the word. Some refused, but many others, including King, agreed.
The boycott was very effective. Most black residents stayed off the buses. Within days, the boycott leaders formed a new group, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). At Nixon's urging, they elected a hesitant King as president, in large part because he was new in town and not embroiled in the competition for congregants and visibility among black ministers. He was also well educated and already a brilliant orator, and thus would be a good public face for the protest movement. The ministers differed over whether to call off the boycott after one day but agreed to put the question up to a vote at a mass meeting.
That night, 7,000 blacks crowded into (and stood outside) the Holt Street Baptist Church. Inspired by King's words - "There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression" - they voted unanimously to continue the boycott. It lasted for 381 days and resulted in the desegregation of the city's buses.
During that time, King honed his leadership skills, aided by advice from two veteran pacifist organizers, Bayard Rustin and Rev. Glenn Smiley, who had been sent to Montgomery by the pacifist group, Fellowship of Reconciliation. During the boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, and he was subjected to personal abuse. But--with the assistance of the new medium of television--he emerged as a national figure.
Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles, spoke more than 2,500 times, and was arrested at least 20 times, always preaching the gospel of nonviolence.
In 1957, King launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to help spread the civil rights crusade to other cities. He helped lead local campaigns in different cities, including Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, where thousands marched to demand an end to segregation in defiance of court injunctions forbidding any protests. While participating in these protests, King also sought to keep the fractious civil rights movement together, despite the rivalries among the NAACP, the Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SCLC. Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles, spoke more than 2,500 times, and was arrested at least 20 times, always preaching the gospel of nonviolence. King attended workshops at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which connected him to a network of radicals, pacifists and union activists from around the country whose ideas helped widen his political horizons.
It is often forgotten that the August 1963 protest rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King was proud of the civil rights movement's success in winning the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year. But he realized that neither law did much to provide better jobs or housing for the masses of black poor in either the urban cities or the rural South. "What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter," he asked, "if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?"
"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
King had hoped that the bus boycott, sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience would stir white southern moderates, led by his fellow clergy, to see the immorality of segregation and racism. His famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," written in 1963, outlines King's strategy of using nonviolent civil disobedience to force a response from the southern white establishment and to generate sympathy and support among white liberals and moderates. "The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation," he wrote, and added, "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
King eventually realized that many white Americans had at least a psychological stake in perpetuating racism. He began to recognize that racial segregation was devised not only to oppress African Americans but also to keep working-class whites from challenging their own oppression by letting them feel superior to blacks. "The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow," King said from the Capitol steps in Montgomery, following the 1965 march from Selma. "And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man."
When King launched a civil rights campaign in Chicago in 1965, he was shocked by the hatred and violence expressed by working-class whites as he and his followers marched through the streets of segregated neighborhoods in Chicago and its suburbs. He saw that the problem in Chicago's ghetto was not legal segregation but "economic exploitation" - slum housing, overpriced food and low-wage jobs - "because someone profits from its existence."
These experiences led King to develop a more radical outlook.
He became increasingly committed to building bridges between the civil rights and labor movements. Invited to address the AFL-CIO's annual convention in 1961, King observed:
"The labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who today attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them."
"Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children."
In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King proclaimed: "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children."
King supported President Lyndon B. Johnson's declaration of the War on Poverty in 1964, but, like his friend and ally Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers, King thought that it did not go nearly far enough. As early as October 1964, he called for a "gigantic Marshall Plan" for the poor--black and white. He began talking openly about the need to confront "class issues," which he described as "the gulf between the haves and the have-nots."
In 1966 King confided to his staff:
"You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."
Speaking to a meeting of Teamsters union shop stewards in 1967, King said, "Negroes are not the only poor in the nation. There are nearly twice as many white poor as Negro, and therefore the struggle against poverty is not involved solely with color or racial discrimination but with elementary economic justice."
King's growing critique of capitalism coincided with his views about American imperialism. By 1965 he had turned against the Vietnam War, viewing it as an economic as well as a moral tragedy. But he was initially reluctant to speak out against the war. He understood that his fragile working alliance with LBJ would be undone if he challenged the president's leadership on the war.
King called America the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and linked the struggle for social justice with the struggle against militarism.Although some of his close advisers tried to discourage him, he nevertheless made the break in April 1967, in a bold and prophetic speech at the Riverside Church in New York City, entitled "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence." King called America the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and linked the struggle for social justice with the struggle against militarism. King argued that Vietnam was stealing precious resources from domestic programs and that the Vietnam War was "an enemy of the poor." In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King wrote, "The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America."
In early 1968, King told journalist David Halberstam, "For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values."
King kept trying to build a broad movement for economic justice that went beyond civil rights. In January, 1968, he announced plans for a Poor People's Campaign, a series of protests to be led by an interracial coalition of poor people and their allies among the middle-class liberals, unions, religious organizations and other progressive groups, to pressure the White House and Congress to expand the War on Poverty. At King's request, socialist activist Michael Harrington (author of The Other America, which helped inspire Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to declare a war on poverty) drafted a Poor People's Manifesto that outlined the campaign's goals. In April, King was in Memphis, Tennessee, to help lend support to striking African American garbage workers and to gain recognition for their union. There, he was assassinated, at age 39, on April 4, a few months before the first protest action of the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, DC.
President Johnson utilized this national tragedy to urge Congress to quickly enact the Fair Housing Act, legislation to ban racial discrimination in housing, which King had strongly supported for two years. He signed the bill a week after King's assassination.
The campaign for a federal holiday in King's honor, spearheaded by Detroit Congressman John Conyers, began soon after his murder, but it did not come up for a vote in Congress until 1979, when it fell five votes short of the number needed for passage. In 1981, with the help of singer Stevie Wonder and other celebrities, supporters collected six million signatures on a petition to Congress on behalf of a King holiday. Congress finally passed legislation enacting the holiday in 1983, 15 years after King's death. But even then, 90 members of the House (including Richard Shelby of Alabama, now in the Senate) voted against it. Senator Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican, led an unsuccessful effort - supported by 21 other senators, including current Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) - to block its passage in the Senate.
The holiday was first observed on January 20, 1986. In 1987, Arizona governor Evan Mecham rescinded King Day as his first act in office, setting off a national boycott of the state. Some states (including New Hampshire, which called it "Civil Rights Day" from 1991 to 1999) insisted on calling the holiday by other names. In 2000, South Carolina became the last state to make King Day a paid holiday for all state employees.
In his final speech in Memphis the night before he was killed, King told the crowd about a bomb threat on his plane from Atlanta that morning, saying he knew that his life was constantly in danger because of his political activism.
"I would like to live a long life," he said. "Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land."
We haven't gotten there yet. But Dr. King is still with us in spirit. The best way to honor his memory is to continue the struggle for human dignity, workers' rights, racial equality, peace and social justice.
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Has Democratic Socialism a Future in American Politics?
The rise in American life of a rapacious corporate capitalism, a widening level of economic inequality, and the sharply rightwing policies of many states and the federal government are clearly inspiring a revolt on the Left
Jul 08, 2018
Recently, when 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an obscure, upfront democratic socialist from the Bronx, easily defeated one of the most powerful U.S. Congressmen in the Democratic primary, the story became an overnight sensation. How, the pundits wondered, could this upset have occurred?
Actually, it shouldn't have been a total surprise for, in recent years, democratic socialism has been making a remarkable comeback in American life. Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist U.S. Senator from Vermont, won 23 Democratic primaries and caucuses during his tumultuous 2016 election campaign. Indeed, he nearly defeated Hillary Clinton, all but coronated by the Democratic Party establishment, for the Democratic presidential nomination. In addition, numerous candidates backed by a Sanders campaign's successor, Our Revolution, won Democratic Party primaries and election to office in 2017 and 2018.
Other indications of socialism's recent popularity are numerous. They include Gallup polls done in early 2016--one showing that 35 percent of Americans had a favorable view of "socialism" and another revealing that 6 out of 10 Democratic primary voters felt that "socialism" had a positive impact on society. Polls found that socialism was especially popular among young people, a key factor behind the jump in membership of Democratic Socialists of America from 5,000 in November 2016 to 40,000 today.
Of course, democratic socialism--centered on the idea of democratic ownership and control of the economy--has had periods of growth, as well as decline, over the course of American history. During the first decades of the 20th century, it flourished. By 1912, the Socialist Party of America, led by charismatic labor leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, had succeeded in electing socialists to 1,200 public offices in 340 American cities, including 79 mayors in 24 states. But, within a few years, the party was largely destroyed by government repression (thanks to its opposition to U.S. entry into World War I) and by its bitter feud with the rising Communist movement over the Communists' contempt for political democracy and civil liberties.
With the onset of the Great Depression, the Socialist Party experienced a modest revival, but soon began to fade as the Democratic Party, then in its New Deal phase, began to implement many of the key programs long championed by democratic socialists: collective bargaining rights for workers; minimum wage and maximum hour laws; public sector jobs for the unemployed; a social security system; and heavy taxes on the rich to pay for an array of social services. Increasingly, the Democratic Party attracted the support of the democratic socialist constituency, including some of its prominent figures--labor leaders like Walter Reuther, David Dubinsky, Sidney Hillman, and A. Philip Randolph, educators like John Dewey, women's rights activists like Margaret Sanger, and popular writers like Upton Sinclair.
For some decades, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, founded in 1973 by the writer Michael Harrington and other committed socialists--and its successor, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)--tried to revive democratic socialism by cutting loose from fruitless third party election campaigns and focusing, instead, on fostering public support for greater economic and social democracy. On occasion, DSA backed worthy candidates in Democratic primaries. But it had only minimal success. For the most part, the best that DSA could do was to keep the democratic socialist current alive by pulling together socialist-minded activists scattered about in the labor, women's rights, racial justice, and peace movements, and putting them in touch with a small group of sympathetic public officials.
Nevertheless, the rise in American life of a rapacious corporate capitalism, a widening level of economic inequality, and the sharply rightwing policies of many states and the federal government are clearly inspiring a revolt on the Left. As the Sanders campaign and the recent election victories of Ocasio-Cortez and other leftwing candidates indicate, in electoral politics this revolt is finding expression largely inside the Democratic Party.
Although it's too early to know how this revolt will play out, there are signs that it is beginning to alter Democratic Party politics. With a heartily-despised Donald Trump in the White House and with rightwing Republicans now dominating Congress and the Supreme Court, many newly-energized leftwing voters will probably close ranks with mainstream Democrats in an all-out Democratic Party effort to drive the Right from power. At the same time, there is a comparable recognition among establishment Democrats that, unless they welcome the growing number of democratic socialists into their ranks, they have little chance of winning elections. This might well explain why so many leading Democratic politicians have now turned to backing the staples of the Sanders campaign, such as Medicare for all, free public college education, and curbs on corporate power. It might also explain why the Democratic National Committee is busy cutting back the establishment-controlled superdelegate system for choosing a presidential candidate.
As a result, just as the Democratic Party largely absorbed America's democratic socialist constituency during the 1930s and 1940 and, in turn, was itself transformed by that process, the same phenomenon might be underway today. For many years, sectarian leftists have railed against the activity of democratic socialists within the Democratic Party, claiming that it has held back a workers' revolution or some other ostensibly glorious occurrence. But this contention seems dubious. Instead, democratic socialist activity within the Democratic Party helped produce the kind of progressive politics and public policy that delivered significant economic and social gains to most Americans in the past. And it might well do so again today.
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Where Are All the Monuments to the Progressive Americans?
The organizers, activists, artists, writers, and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country often go unacknowledged.
Sep 16, 2017
The current controversy over whether to dismantle statues of some prominent Confederate figures is a battle over whom we admire and consider as heroes. It is also a battle over who has power to shape how we view our history.
"Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee," President Donald Trump said last month after the struggle in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. "So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?"
In May, the New Orleans City Council declared monuments of Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard public nuisances and had them removed. In August, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered Confederate monuments removed from the city's public spaces. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, directed the dismantling of a statue in front of the State House of Roger Taney--a Supreme Court justice who was chief author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that ruled that African-Americans could not be American citizens. Earlier this month, in response to student protests, Yale University renamed Calhoun College--a residential complex named for John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina, vice president and influential advocate for slavery--Hopper College, after Rear Adm. Grace Murray Hopper, a computer pioneer and naval officer. To buttress the symbolism, Yale removed a portrait of Calhoun from a dining hall.
Shouldn't we also honor the organizers, activists, artists, writers, athletes, judges and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country? The New York Times recently published a list of the Confederate monuments that are now subject of controversy in cities across the country.
Not surprisingly, most monuments celebrate political, business and military figures. You can criss-cross the country and find statues, schools, government and university buildings, museums, parks, and streets celebrating presidents, senators, governors, jurists, inventor-entrepeneurs, founders of major corporations, generals and fallen soldiers. But our veneration of them often comes at the expense of recognizing other citizens who had a major role in shaping our nation's history.
Shouldn't we also honor the organizers, activists, artists, writers, athletes, judges, and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country? What about the pioneers who built movements and gave voice to the struggles for women's suffrage, protecting the environment and consumers, putting an end to lynching, giving workers the right to form unions, and pushing for a progressive income tax, a federal minimum wage, old-age insurance, the 8-hour workday and government-subsidized health care and housing?
When they first advanced their ideas, they were considered impractical idealists, utopian dreamers or dangerous radicals. Now we take these ideas for granted. We all stand on their shoulders.
To create a partial catalogue of monuments celebrating progressive figures, I've drawn on the people profiled in my book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame. I've identified statues located in public places (but not busts of heads or paintings, parks or public buildings), celebrating these progressive figures.
The list focuses on people whose influence was primarily during the 20th century--so Tom Paine, Daniel Shays, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, William Monroe Trotter, William Lloyd Garrison, Mother Jones, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Henry Demarest Lloyd, John Muir, Ida Wells, Terrence Powderly, Thorsten Veblen and Jacob Riis, among other radicals and reformers, are not included.
A Short Tour of Monuments to Progressives
A statue of Tom L. Johnson, the progressive mayor of Cleveland from 1901 to 1909, is located in Cleveland's Public Square.
A statue of Robert M. La Follette Sr., the progressive Wisconsin governor and senator, sits in National Statuary Hall in the US Capitol. A number of public schools throughout Wisconsin are named for La Follette.
Crusading lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis adorns the campus of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Besides the university, many public schools--including high schools in New York City and San Antonio--are named for Brandeis.
Attorney Clarence Darrow spent most of his career defending radicals and labor activists, but he's most famous for defending evolution in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. A statue of Darrow sits on the lawn in front of the Rhea County Court House in Dayton, Tennessee. It was dedicated on July 14, 2017 and sits opposite the statue of William Jennings Bryan, who beat Darrow in that controversial case.
This statue of Theodore Roosevelt on Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River across from Washington, D.C. is one of many statues and schools named for the trust-busting president. You call also visit three national parks in honor of the environmental president.
The name of progressive philosopher and school reformer John Dewey adorns public schools in Denver; New York City; Warrensville Heights, Ohio; Flint, Michigan and elsewhere, but there are no statues with Dewey's likeness.
A sculpture of urban reformer Jane Addams, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1931), can be found on the campus of Cal State University in Fresno. Schools in Seattle; New York City; Bolingbrook and Moline, Illinois; Long Beach, California and other cities are named for the founder of modern social work.
Students in Sacramento can attend Hiram Johnson High School, and the public can visit the state office building in San Francisco named for the progressive governor, but there are no statues celebrating his life.
A statue of scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois is located at his alma mater, Fisk University. The main library at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, a physics building at Fisk University, and dormitories at the University of Pennsylvania and Hampton University are named for DuBois. Public schools is Chicago, Baltimore, Wake Forest, N.C., and elsewhere are named for him, too.
This statue of Alice Hamilton, a crusading physician who founded the modern field of occupational health, sits in Headwaters Park in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
A middle school in New York City is named for Robert F. Wagner, the progressive New Deal senator who led fights for workers' rights and public housing, but there are no statues erected to honor him.
These statues of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt at the Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York are among the many statues and schools named in their honor. A stunning recent addition to the collection of memorials is The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial along the Potomac in Washington, D.C.
A 12-foot-high, 4-ton statue of Albert Einstein is set at the entrance to the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Einstein is holding a paper engraved with the equations for his major scientific contributions. There are dozens of other Einstein statues in the U.S. and around the world and many schools named after the famous scientist and socialist.
This statue of the pioneering and fearless birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, with a gag over her mouth, stands in Old South Meeting House in Boston. There are no schools named for the controversial socialist and feminist.
A monument to John L. Lewis--leader of the mine workers union and later the Congress of Industrial Orgnizations (CIO)--sits in Monongahela Township, Greene County, Pennsylvania, on a site where 37 coal miners lost their lives in a mine explosion in 1962. There's another statue of the brilliant orator and labor leader at the John L. Lewis Mining & Labor Museum in Lucas, Iowa.
Several statues of Helen Keller portray the socialist, feminist and pacifist as a young girl learning how to speak, like this one located in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, of Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan. The Keller statue in National Statutory Hall in the US Capitol in Washington, DC shows her at a pump, where she spoke her first word, "water." There are many schools around the country named for the founder of what is now called the disability rights movement.
There's no sculpture of consumer and labor activist Frances Perkins, but the US Department of Labor building and the Frances Perkins Academy in New York City are named for the first female Cabinet secretary and a crusading New Deal reformer. However, the governor of Maine recently tried to have the Frances Perkins Conference Room in the state capitol renamed in view of her pro-labor stance.
Famed New York City Mayor and congressman Fiorello La Guardia sits in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. New York's La Guardia High School is one of the premier arts high schools in the country.
Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan and the Norman Thomas '05 Library at Princeton University are named after the leader of the American Socialist Party and frequent presidential candidate, from the 1930s through the 1950s. A plaque at the Princeton library reads: "Norman M. Thomas, class of 1905. 'I am not the champion of lost causes, but the champion of causes not yet won.'"
Swarthmore College named a dormitory after suffragist leader Alice Paul, a graduate of the college. Montclair State University in New Jersey has also named a building in her honor. And you can pay homage to Alice Paul and other women's rights luminaries at the National Park Service's Belmont-Paul National Historic Site.
An apartment building in Philadelphia bears the name of Sidney Hillman, the founder and president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and a key backer of FDR's New Deal program.
A. Philip Randolph, civil rights and labor leader and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, sits in Boston's Back Bay Train Station. Another statue of Randolph was erected in the concourse of Union Station in Washington, D.C. Schools in Jacksonville, Florida; New York City; Philadelphia and Atlanta are named in his honor. Jacksonville renamed one of its streets A. Phillip Randolph Boulevard and an A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum is located in Chicago's Pullman Historic District.
Statues of the radical Minnesota Depression-era Farmer-Labor Party Gov. Floyd Olson, including one in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, have been constructed throughout state.
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, sits outside St. Mary's Catholic Church in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Another Day statue can be found in front of the Solanus Casey Center in Detroit. Dormitories at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois, the University of Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Loyola University in Maryland are named in her honor. Broadway Housing Communities, a supportive housing project in New York City, opened the Dorothy Day Apartment Building at 583 Riverside Drive in 2003.
The name of actor, activist, singer and linguist Paul Robeson adorns public schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, and New Brunswick and Trenton, New Jersey. In 1976, the apartment building on Edgecombe Avenue in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan where Robeson lived during the early 1940s was officially renamed the Paul Robeson Residence, and the street was renamed Paul Robeson Boulevard. The main library at Rutgers University, Robeson's alma mater, is named for him. There are no statues, but many busts of Robeson, including this one at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio.
The people of Yakima, Washington honored their native son, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, with a statue in front of Davis High School, his alma mater.
The Los Angeles Unified School District named a school in Wilmington after Harry Bridges, the longtime left-wing leader of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. There's a bust of Bridges in San Pedro, Los Angeles' waterfront district, and the union is currently seeking a home for a newlycompleted statue.
A statue of Langston Hughes--poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer and columnist--sits in the Watkins Community Museum of History in Lawrence, Kansas. Schools in Lawrence; East Orange, New Jersey; Baltimore; Chicago; New Orleans and Fairburn, Georgia are named for Hughes.
New York City named a school after left-wing congressman Vito Marcantonio, who represented Harlem in Congress from 1934-50.
The Ella Baker School in Manhattan, serving pre-K to eighth-grade students, is named for the civil rights organizer.
There's a statue of Theodor Geisel--whose children's books, under the pen name Dr. Seuss, took aim at bullies, hypocrites and demagogues--on the campus of the University of California-San Diego, not far from the Geisel Library.
In 2010, fans of William J. Brennan, Jr., unveiled a statue of the Supreme Court justice in front of the Essex County Hall of Records in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. William J. Brennan High School, named for the author of many far-reaching decisions including Roe v. Wade and the Miranda rulings, is located in San Antonio, Texas. The historic Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City, New Jersey, which had opened in 1910, was named the William J. Brennan Court House in 1989.
Schools named for Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the theologian who was active in the civil rights and anti-war movements, are located in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.
A statue of environmental crusader Rachel Carson was dedicated in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 2013. Schools named for Carson are located in New York City; Chicago; San Jose, California; Herndon, Virginia; Gaithersburg, Maryland; Sammamish, Washington and Beaverton, Oregon.
Riverfront Park in Wheeling, West Virginia is home to a statue of Walter Reuther, longtime president of the United Auto Workers and a founder of the modern labor movement. Walter Reuther High School is part of the public school system in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Walter Reuther Middle School is located in Rochester Hills, Michigan.
A statue of Thurgood Marshall--the courageous leader of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, lead lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case and the first African-American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, stands in front of the State House in Annapolis, Maryland. Another Marshall statue stands in front of the federal courthouse in Baltimore. High schools in San Francisco; Dayton, Ohio; and Missouri City, Texas are named for Marshall.
There's probably no progressive American with more monuments in his honor than Martin Luther King Jr. His name adorns many schools, streets, buildings and statues, including this one on the University of Texas campus in Austin. You can also visit the National Park Service memorial to Dr. King along the banks of the Potomac.
The West Chester (Pennsylvania) Area School District named its newest high school after native Bayard Rustin, a key organizer in the civil rights movement who coordinated the 1963 March on Washington.
Okemah, Oklahoma honored its most famous native, folk singer Woody Guthrie (who wrote "This Land Is Your Land") with a statue in its downtown area. Another Guthrie statue is located in Washington state near the Grand Coulee Dam, the subject of several Guthrie songs.
A statue of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was unveiled in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi in 2012. Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School and Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School are located in the Bronx section of New York City.
The Los Angeles Dodgers unveiled a statue of baseball legend and civil rights activist Jackie Robinson outside Dodger Stadium in April 2017. There are also statues in Brooklyn; Pasadena, California; Jersey City, New Jersey; Daytona Beach, Florida; and Los Angeles on the UCLA campus honoring the Hall of Fame player who broke baseball's color line in 1947. Schools in Milwaukee, New York City and elsewhere also are named after Robinson.
A statue of Malcolm X can be found in the former Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, the site of his 1965 assassination.
Chavez Plaza at California State University San Marcos includes a statue dedicated to Cesar Chavez as does the University of Texas at Austin. There are public schools named for the leader of the farmworkers movement in Portland, Oregon; Coachella, California; Phoenix and many other cities.
New York City is home to Harvey Milk High School, named after San Francisco supervisor and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States. A bust of Milkis located in San Francisco City Hall.
Missing Monuments
You won't find statues of some of the nation's most influential radicals and reformers. We may stand on their shoulders, but we can't stand on their statues, because they don't exist.
Here are just a few of those who aren't commemorated in any substantial way: Eugene V. Debs, Florence Kelley, Victor Berger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lincoln Steffens, Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, Lewis Hine, Upton Sinclair, Rose Schneiderman, Roger Baldwin, Myles Horton, Harry Hay, Saul Alinsky, Virginia Durr, Carey McWilliams, C. Wright Mills, I.F. Stone, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Arthur Miller, Jane Jacobs, Jerry Wurf, Barry Commoner, Pete Seeger, Howard Zinn, Michael Harrington, William Sloane Coffin, Allard Lowenstein, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ted Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, and Paul Wellstone.
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