Long before workers feared losing their jobs to an AI bot army, civil rights leaders feared losing ground in their war on Jim Crow because of the automation of industrialized labor. As historian Nancy MacLean writes in Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, Black activists worried “that just as Reconstruction had been undone in the industrial revolution, so was the civil rights movement in danger of being undone in the automation revolution.”
The fear was far-reaching. You could hear it in Malcolm X warning, “Automation is limiting jobs,” and in Martin Luther King Jr. cautioning, “Automation and cybernetics are edging the Negro and certain poor whites into…permanent uselessness and hopeless impoverishment,” and in Bayard Rustin writing, “Workers have been displaced by automation, rendered economically functionless in modern industrial society.” By the mid-1960s, the freedom movement was seized by a tragic irony which the Urban League described as Black workers “winning the right to get a job at just the time when the job itself is disappearing.”
Yet, of all the civil rights leaders to address this quandary, perhaps no one captured the peril and promise of that moment more than A. Philip Randolph. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, before hundreds of thousands of people at the March on Washington, the longtime labor leader declared, “Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practice Act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, Black and white?
“The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality,” Randolph thundered in his practiced baritone. “It falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property. It falls to us to demand new forms of social planning, to create full employment, and to put automation at the service of human needs, not at the service of profits—for we are the worst victims of unemployment.”
In the years after the March on Washington, Randolph’s call to create “new forms of social planning” to address automation and unemployment took the form of the Freedom Budget. Published on Oct. 26, 1966—and championed by Randolph, Rustin and King—the Freedom Budget was an ambitious policy plan to prevent a world in which machines would push people into social dislocation.
