Bayard Rustin Offers an Alternative: The “Freedom Budget” (1967)

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on military things. It wasn't that we wanted them to do it, but we had to make a sensible estimate. The second criticism of the freedom budget is that it doesn't say enough about the participation of the poor. Well, I want to make it quite clear there's nobody who has spent more of his life trying to make it possible for the poor to express themselves. I am all for like the young militant Negroes, the right of Negroes to have a decision over their lives. Everybody else has. Why not us? But I am not going to fall for a gang of foolishness. Ultimately in a democracy real participation of the poor, whether radicals like to think so or not, until the moment of revolution comes, by which I mean violent revolution, is in the political processes of the major

political parties and the minor political parties which affect their behavior. Now you take a small group of Negroes working on housing in Newark, New Jersey. They think because they get together and vote Mrs. Smith onto some board, that that's real democratic participation. It is possible only if we can get a freedom budget in which the United States is committing billions of dollars to being sent into Newark. Otherwise Mrs Jones is sitting on a committee voting in the vacuum that no matter what those Negroes on that committee decide, it ultimately doesn't make any difference because there isn't any money anyhow. So I am saying that in the process of insisting on the right to be heard and to help make decisions, that is a process

of masturbation unless it is overall covered by a financial policy and priorities in the nation that is meaningful. The freedom budget stands for the change of priorities, national planning, the government becoming the employer of last resort, the government becoming the houser of last resort, the dedication of putting sufficient money in the people's pockets so that they can live in this affluent society with dignity, free education, free medical care. But much much much more important

Bayard Rustin Offers an Alternative: The “Freedom Budget” (1967)

Bayard Rustin is an unsung hero of the Black Freedom Struggle, a behind-the-scenes organizer who planned the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In a speech entitled “Firebombs or a Freedom Budget” that aired on WGBH radio in 1967, he criticizes the inadequacy of War on Poverty job training programs in addressing the problem of “hopelessness” that was leading to “riots” in Black communities. Instead, he argues for a “Freedom Budget for All Americans,” a ten-year plan developed in 1966 by the A. Philip Randolph Institute in conjunction with a coalition of civil rights, labor, and religious leaders, and other public intellectuals. The “Freedom Budget” called for the government to provide jobs, free education, and free healthcare to the poor–a program of expansive state action that would have dwarfed the War on Poverty. However, this excerpt also shows how Rustin criticizes Black “militants” who are fighting at the local level for community participation.

Bayard Rustin: Firebombs Or A Freedom Budget | WGBH | December 11, 1967 This clip and associated transcript appear from 41:47 - 44:35 in the full record.

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