Rustin wanted to bring together a coalition of progressive forces in the Democratic Party because he thought it was, as he put it in his 1969 essay “The Ballot Box and the Union Card,” the “sole mass-based political organization in the country that has the potential to become a majority movement for progressive social reform.” Jacobson wanted young radicals to revitalize the labor movement “since so many of them are teachers, professionals and white collar workers.” By joining it instead of scorning it, they could “change the face of the labor movement by struggling from within the AFL-CIO to crack the thick layers of bureaucratic crust and to make a meaningful reality of the slogan for a Negro-Labor alliance.”
At the same time, Jacobson was right to argue that the likes of Rustin were overly accommodative of a sclerotic AFL-CIO leadership, as their evolution into labor lieutenants of US imperialism made all too tragically clear. Organized labor in the late 1960s, particularly the craft and building-trades unions, was often as corrupt and exclusionary and hawkish as Jacobson said it was. But he was far too dogmatic about the Democratic Party, and failed to see how coalition politics might be dynamically combined with the fight to transform the labor movement.
Jacobson insisted that “the coalitionists cannot drive the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party.” He was, of course, entirely wrong. The process of pushing the Dixiecrats into the Republican Party began as early as the 1930s, as Eric Schickler demonstrates in his excellent book Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965. Southern Democratic party-states were on their last legs by the mid-1960s, and the New Politics movement of the 1970s — which aimed to turn the party into a disciplined, mass-membership party roughly similar to labor and social democratic parties around the world — shoved Dixiecrats through an exit door that was already wide open.
Jacobson denounced the compromise, brokered in part by Rustin, that prevented the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) from being seated as the official delegation from that state to the 1964 Democratic National Convention (DNC) at Atlantic City. This was a bitter pill for the MFDP to swallow, and they understandably rejected it. Nonetheless, their bold challenge to the white supremacist Mississippi Democrats paved the way to ending racial discrimination in the delegate selection process.
