“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121
James Talarico Aug 5, 2026 “That’s the movement we’re building here in Texas. Not a politics of fear, not a politics of division, but a politics of unity, a politics of friendship, a politics of love. This new kind of politics can change our state. It can change our country. This new kind of politics can build a New American Dream.” 00:00 – Opening Remarks 01:03 – Launch of “A New American Dream” 01:49 – Augusta’s Story 03:26 – The American Dream 05:01 – American Nightmare 05:52 – The Powell Memo 08:01 – Affordability Crisis 09:19 – New Kind of Politics 11:31 – Action Plan 12:48 – Addressing Debt Crisis 14:52 – LBJ’s Legacy 17:09 – Texas Energy 18:22 – Technology & AI 21:30 – Pro-People is Pro-Growth 22:52 – Why This Race Matters 24:30 – Defining the New American Dream 25:29 – Room 112 in San Antonio 27:05 – Closing Remarks
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine.If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
The process of evaluating canonization for Dorothy Day had its 25th anniversary last year, which might seem inauspicious if it did not require a thorough evaluation of all the books, journals, newspaper stories, diary entries, personal letters, and FBI intelligence memos composed by and about her and her closest associates for all 83 years of her life. Day’s FBI file alone, admittedly duplicative, is 830 pages long. There’s a whole book dedicated to her letters to and from Thomas Merton, who like just about every one of Day’s good friends spent considerable time under intelligence agency surveillance. Her granddaughter wrote a tell-all family memoir detailing her mother’s decision to divorce her gay husband and leave the Church, and the horrific sex abuse cult that emerged from a breakaway faction at a farm owned by the Catholic Worker. And she spent the most thoroughly documented period of her life, between her 1916 arrival in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and her 1927 conversion to Catholicism, in the company of other alcohol-abusing communist writers, nearly all of whom also wrote dishy memoirs detailing their youthful indiscretions, scandals, and flames. Day wrote a roman à clef detailing posing as a nude model and her destructive romance with a womanizing writer. She was arrested for prostitution and received an abortion from a greasy-haired hobo doctor who was famously one of Emma Goldman’s lovers.
There is, in short, just too much tea on this woman, the whole glorious Catholic Worker Movement she founded, and the left-wing icons who traveled around them: John Dos Passos, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and more. Two of Day’s Jewish ex-boyfriends sparred with Ernest Hemingway. Day left the first to become a kind of complicated, mostly platonic muse and drinking companion to Eugene O’Neill; Day could drink him and any other man under the table, at least according to poet Malcolm Cowley, who was at the time married to Day’s best friend, sex-positive late-in-life Catholic convert Peggy Baird Johns. Another poet, W.H. Auden, paid a delinquent fine from the city on Day’s behalf.
You can feel the canonization council wondering, how is there no prestige TV epic on these people? And yet even during those years, Day emerged with her saintliness intact. The night she got arrested for prostitution, for example, she was ministering to a sick woman who happened to be the side chick of her Mr. Big figure, Lionel Moise. She watched a woman experience severe morphine withdrawal and ruminated on the tragedy of sin. She broke it off with Moise soon afterward, though he nearly killed her first. She was 108 pounds when she moved back to New York, where Peggy nursed her back to health and convinced her to buy a small cottage on Staten Island, where her friend Mike Gold bought a place down the road and the journey finally began.
IT WAS MIKE GOLD who first noticed that Dorothy Day had a thing for God, back when he still wrote under his given name, Itzok Granich, and the two started dating after bonding over labor rights and Dostoyevsky and their differing views on the Lower East Side, Day’s adopted neighborhood where Gold had spent his whole impoverished life. Both Gold and Day had downwardly mobile parents: His father had been injured working as a painter, and hers had lost everything in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, moving the family to a drab gray apartment complex on the South Side of Chicago. Day still owned nice things and presented like “a well-bred young woman,” but there was something she envied in her immigrant neighbors’ fire escapes, vegetable gardens, and glorious kitchen smells, a fortitude drawn from old-world culture and religion that contrasted with someone like her father—a person whom modern right-wingers would deem a “heritage American”—steeped in Calvinism and regularly gambling away the family’s money.
Day’s grandfathers had fought on opposing sides in the Civil War, and her father’s mom still seethed with resentment about it. No one on either end of her family had any memory of a life before America, a Calvinist experiment whose identity was too inextricably intertwined with the vulgar profit maximization logic to have imbued its natives with anything profound. Catholicism seemed to her a part of this, as she’d thought ever since accidentally barging in as a child on her friend Kathryn’s mother kneeling down in prayer in her ghastly tenement apartment.
Dorothy Day (center) holding copies of The New York Call, a socialist daily newspaper, with Rose Cohn and Charlotte Margolies, February 9, 1917. Credit: Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries
Gold assured Day that Catholicism wasn’t everything she fantasized about; after all, Orthodox Judaism was even older than the Church, and the pointless version of it his robotic Hebrew school teacher feebly attempted to indoctrinate him into was wholly devoid of meaning or beauty, in his estimation. But he understood what Day was searching for because he loved Tolstoy too, just as she gravitated toward the “Marxists, the IWWs who looked upon religion as the opiate of the people, who thought they had only this one life to live and then oblivion,” precisely because they were so “eager to sacrifice themselves here and now, thus doing without now and for all eternity the good things of the world they were fighting to obtain for their brothers.” Gold was, she would always say, the only one of Day’s “bohemian friends” who instantly understood and accepted her need to devote more time to God.
Seven years after their brief engagement, Day and Gold became neighbors, using the proceeds of their respective “novels” to buy cottages on the same Staten Island block, where Gold’s mother visited Day with occasional home-cooked kosher meals. Gold’s book had been such a success that he’d adapted his John Brown biography as a play, and Day’s relative lack of success was eclipsed by the fact that she was now Catholic, pregnant, and blissfully happy. And yet Gold hadn’t been entirely wrong about the Church. The congregations were full of second- and third-generation parishioners trained to “cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington, all part of a pattern, all prospering if we are good, and going down in the world if we are bad. These are attitudes the Irish, the Italian, the Lithuanian, the Slovak and all races begin to acquire in school. So they change their names, forget their birthplace, their language, and no longer listen to their mothers when they say, ‘when I was a little girl in Russia, or Hungary, or Sicily’” and “try to be something which they call ‘an American.’”
Gold was after something different. As the dedication of his 1930 novel Jews Without Money rhapsodized:
O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely, suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah. You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit. O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to live. O great Beginning!
At the time, the highest-profile American Catholic was Detroit-based priest Father Coughlin, a conspiracy-minded, increasingly fascist-leaning populist whose syndicated radio show drew 30 million weekly listeners throughout the Depression. Fatefully, Gold’s brother, who was living in the Staten Island place, invited Day to the event that would change her life: the first “hunger march” the Communist Party and unions were holding in Washington on behalf of unemployed workers, who at that point comprised nearly 20 percent of the workforce. The protest attracted 3,000 marchers, most in rusted jalopies out of The Grapes of Wrath, she later recalled. As they began to approach the border of the city, cops barricaded the highway, trapping the marchers in their freezing cold cars for three nights. Day watched with “joy and pride in the courage of this band of men and women” as they were finally given permission to march and they streamed out into the streets.
Day’s Catholic Worker advocated strongly for the poor, but its fierce anti-war stance alienated some subscribers. Credit: Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries
“How our dear Lord must love them, I kept thinking to myself,” she would write later, musing: “Where are all the Catholics?” She stopped at the newly built shrine at Catholic University for Mass and contemplated the fact that years after her baptism, she still didn’t really know any fellow Catholics.
THEN PETER MAURIN—a well-dressed and highly educated crank from a big French farming family in Languedoc who had spent some time in the Christian Brothers—began showing up at Day’s door on the recommendation of a mutual acquaintance, and often talked at her for hours until he returned to a flophouse, or later, whatever bed was free in one of the holdings in the Catholic Worker’s small portfolio of barely habitable real estate. He proposed she launch a newspaper and call it the Catholic Radical. She found a press that agreed to print 2,500 copies for $57, but she preferred The Catholic Worker, which hurt Maurin’s feelings just enough that he stopped coming to her apartment every day, but not enough to stay away very long or stop submitting the short poems he called “Easy Essays” for publication.
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The newspaper debuted on May Day 1933, the same spring that unemployment hit its all-time high of 25.6 percent, with a front-page story on the suppression and censorship of two investigations into a Mississippi flood control project overseen by the Department of War where the working conditions had been deemed sub-slavery: 120-degree heat, beatings from foremen, ten-cent-an-hour wages docked for egregiously marked-up gruel, men sleeping in airless tents on the mud. Another story detailed the complaints of a garment worker who went from making $35 a week to being unable to find the same work for $8. A column inside excerpted a Paulist priest’s recent speech opining that the Church was “pregnant with promise, but Catholics still-born with prejudice … not so much because we are Catholics as because we are Americans.”
With a bottomless supply of down-and-out volunteers looking to help write or distribute the newspaper, the Catholic Worker office quickly turned into a de facto soup kitchen and boardinghouse, and soon enough they found a larger space in Little Italy that enabled them to feed a thousand souls each day. Almost instantly, it became easy for the newspaper to detail a squadron of supporters to any picket line or protest, and Day was especially emphatic about showing up for causes often derided in the newspapers as “communist.”
In 1935, the Worker began hosting anti-Nazi protests outside the German consulate and the church of a priest known to support Hitler’s agenda, with Maurin carrying a sign that read, “Spiritually we are all Semites.” Catholic antisemitism was overheating at the time, thanks in part to the monstrous radio-fueled popularity of Father Coughlin, whose own newspaper Social Justice employed subway-platform hawkers who’d occasionally get in street fights with the volunteers who sold The Catholic Worker. When Coughlin published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion just months before Kristallnacht, Day teamed up with the Jesuits to publish 100,000 copies of a detailed rebuttal of the legendary antisemitic hoax and demand the Roosevelt administration begin accepting Jewish refugees.
As with so many bastions of the American left, The Catholic Worker’s power and reach peaked in the 1930s, when its circulation approached 200,000 and most of the souls it fed and housed were merely unemployed workers. As World War II approached, the men and women who frequented the breadlines and boardinghouses became less palatable, as did Day’s principled opposition to all war, and the alleged hotbed of “subversion” that was her network of soup kitchens. All this occasioned J. Edgar Hoover’s 1943 FBI inquiry, which wasn’t quite razor-sharp: The Bureau’s trusted informants seem to have believed Day was a recent Russian émigré. But hundreds of churches and Catholic organizations canceled their subscriptions to the Worker over its anti-war absolutism.
Still, the Church itself—and specifically, New York’s oftenvillainous warmongering Cardinal Francis Spellman—protected Dorothy Day, even through her scathing condemnations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese American internment camps, the gravediggers’ strike of 1949, and the McCarthy-era show trials that nuked the careers of so many of her old colleagues and friends. She was constantly on the road preaching the Catholic Worker gospel against napalm, CIA assassination campaigns, segregation, voter suppression, the blockade of Cuba; and for radical love, liberation theology, the dignity of all humans, and Vatican II.
Though it was not so easy to find a physical copy of The Catholic Worker in the 1950s, its sentences could be rare gems. (The designated obituary writer’s account of an alcoholic named Jim Connors who had been sleeping in a coffin-sized chicken coop before he found a bed at the Catholic Worker, from whose roof he subsequently fell to a ghastly death, was one of the more affecting works of literature I’ve consumed in a long time.)
Despite her irrepressible radicalism, Day has been considered for canonization by the Catholic Church for a lifetime of faith and meaning. Credit: Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries; Bob Fitch/Bob Fitch photography archive/Stanford University LibrariesCredit: Bob Fitch/Bob Fitch photography archive/Stanford University Libraries
Day lived until Thanksgiving weekend, 1980. On the day she was buried, three American nuns and a Catholic lay worker in El Salvador were abducted, raped, and murdered at the hands of a fascist death squad backed by the United States, their mutilated bodies left to rot on a roadside as a warning to the thoroughly terrorized peasantry. The following year, longtime Catholic Worker staffer Jane Sammon, who had met another murdered El Salvadoran activist just a few months earlier, described the shock and nausea of learning all over again “what the Church in Latin America had known for more than a decade: The Gospel brings death to those who preach it.”
They were not the first martyrs for Day’s radical Catholicism. A 22-year-old Catholic Worker staffer set himself on fire outside the United Nations building in 1965 in solidarity with the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who had done the same to protest the Cardinal Spellman–promoted South Vietnamese government’s persecution and periodic massacring of Buddhists a few years prior. And some followers of Day’s disciple Thomas Merton are convinced that the CIA was behind his bizarre “electrocution” in 1968. But the price of practicing Dorothy Day–style Catholicism would rise considerably in the era of Reagan and John Paul II. President Reagan staunchly backed the openly Hitlerian El Salvadoran junta who ordered the nuns’ assassinations, along with those of Archbishop (now Saint) Oscar Romero, six Jesuit priests, and at least a dozen other members of the Catholic clergy for the sin of “spreading communism.” Pope John Paul II chose to respond to the bloodbath by forcing one of American foreign policy’s fiercest critics in the American government, the Jesuit priest and Democratic congressman from Massachusetts Fr. Robert Drinan, to resign from public office.
As global communism fizzled and the fascist Catholicism of the Francoist project Opus Dei flourished, the radical Catholicism of Day entered a period of near hibernation almost akin to that imposed upon such subversives as Mike Gold, who worked as a janitor in the 1950s as the circulation of his columns dropped to 5,000.
NEARLY A CENTURY after his heyday, even Mike Gold is in the throes of a resurrection. It turns out the villain of Jews Without Money, who sets in action the protagonist’s slide into destitution when he scams his father out of his ownership stake in a small zipper factory, is a hard-line Zionist, whose ideology is cast as an extension of the same virulent racism that leads him to return to the tenements to sell fractional investments in a segregated housing development in the New Jersey suburbs. Gold later edited New Masses when it published a 1935 prophetic takedown of “Jewish Hitler” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the intellectual godfather of the bloodthirsty Zionist fascism that currently terrorizes the Middle East; and he was an early advocate of a “binational Arab-Jewish” one-state solution in Palestine championed by the beloved new mayor of New York, who appears to have cribbed his political identity from Fiorello La Guardia, the “one-man melting pot” who led the city when Gold and Day were at the pinnacle of their political powers.
Day’s own return to relevance was championed by no less than the deeply reactionary Pope Benedict, in one of his last speeches before the mysterious resignation that unleashed the Vatican’s first Jesuit pontiff, the irrepressible Pope Francis, who inspired this deeply lapsed Catholic to belatedly have her own sons baptized in a small, historically Black Catholic church about a mile down the road from the basilica where Day tearfully prayed for the answer that became the Catholic Worker Movement. I only began attending weekly Mass there, however, during the early weeks of Pope Leo XIV, which coincided with the breathtaking evil unleashed by the second term of Donald Trump, whose institutional death squads staffed by Palantir hackers and anarcho-capitalist legal theorists waged dirty war on every remaining American organization designed to promote the public interest: hospitals and schools, infectious disease trackers and air traffic controllers, weather balloons and disaster responders, IRS auditors and taxation watchdogs.
Day came of age in an America that lacked most of those things, that used the awesome powers of its federal government to break strikes and massacre Bonus Marchers and execute Sacco and Vanzetti and colonize Cuba for the slaveholder class and employ the goons who’d beaten and tortured her during her first stint in prison for protesting World War I. She achieved national fame during the governance of progressive men like FDR and La Guardia, but she harbored no illusions that a state founded to promote capitalist greed or an ideology developed in service of said greed’s eradication could nurture the radical, indefatigable love she sought to spread through humankind.
She famously inspired the conversion of one Catholic Worker subway hawker when she returned to the office after Mass in a huff that the organist had started pounding out “The Star-Spangled Banner” immediately following Communion; as the whole congregation obediently stood, Day herself, much to the awe of her disciple, had knelt back down and prayed for a laity that would rebel against that warmongering song. In 1975, The Catholic Worker published a column suggesting that on the occasion of the American bicentennial, readers should “repent” for their nation’s murderous subjugations and genocides of Native and Black Americans, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the “plundering of our resources to build up the monstrous stockpiles of diabolic weapons,” “lies and plots and murders of the FBI and CIA,” and finally of “our own indifference to the starving millions of the world.” Day was the last Catholic who would have been surprised by that same state’s facilitation of the liquidation of Gaza and the quarter-century campaign to lay waste to the Middle East, its harrowing crackdowns on anti-genocide protesters and its systematic imprisonment and torture of vast swaths of brown-skinned Americans for the crime of standing in the Home Depot parking lot.
In a decade of unprecedented populist state reform, Dorothy Day cast her lot with the Catholic Church—of all things!—purely on the basis of a kind of spiritual hunch that for all the Vatican’s hypocrisy and duplicity, the revolutionary philosophy it was designed to sustain still meant something in the hearts of its believers, and that those believers would change the world if they heeded the call.
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US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Michigan Democratic candidate for US Senate Abdul El-Sayed, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) address a rally on July 18, 2026 in Detroit, Michigan.
(Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images)
“I’m happy to burn your money for you, and then we can get on to the business of governing,” Abdul El-Sayed said in a message to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
After setting over $30 million on fire in Michigan’s Democratic US Senate primary, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is reportedly plotting round two against progressive epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed—this time seeking to boost his Republican general election opponent, Mike Rogers.
The New York Timesreported Wednesday that the pro-Israel lobbying organization, known as AIPAC, “has told allies that it is considering a major financial campaign to support the Republican Senate nominee in the Michigan general election this fall.” AIPACsaid publicly following El-Sayed’s victory over Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) in Tuesday’s primary that “our members remain determined to ensure that voters reject Dr. El-Sayed and his radical anti-Israel agenda in November.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who endorsed and campaigned for El-Sayed, wrote in response to AIPAC’s post-election statement that she appreciates the group “proving it doesn’t belong in the Dem Party and especially in our primaries.”
“From endorsing Jan. 6th members to ensuring Congress remains in the hands of a 34-count felon, AIPAC is an org committed to undermining democracy at home and abroad,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on social media. “See you in November.”
Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) noted that “a big majority of Americans want the US government to stop sending American dollars to Israel’s reckless regime and to end the war in Iran.”
“Yet AIPAC is threatening to spend to deliver the Republicans a critical Senate seat in Michigan, helping a Trump stooge like Mike Rogers who will keep funding Netanyahu’s wars and do nothing to stop Trump’s Iran war,” said Deluzio. “This is exactly why so many Democrats like me have rejected AIPAC.”
AIPAC cash accounted for around half of all outside spending in the contest between El-Sayed and Stevens—the most expensive Democratic primary in American history.
But the organization and its affiliated groups appear to have plenty more resources to devote to the general election, the results of which could decide control of the US Senate next year.
The United Democracy Project (UDP), AIPAC’s super PAC, had over $80 million in cash in hand at the end of June, according to federal filings.
During a virtual town hall days before Tuesday’s election, El-Sayed—a vocal opponent of US support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza—dared AIPAC to keep pouring its financial resources into Michigan’s Senate race.
“AIPAC, if you’re listening, burn your money. Come back and burn it again in the general,” said El-Sayed. “I’m happy to burn your money for you, and then we can get on to the business of governing and asking whether or not our foreign policy ought to be dictated to us by the interests of a foreign government.”
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Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico speaks during a “Talarico for Texas: Frontera Tour” campaign rally at Memo’s Restaurant on July 13, 2026 in Del Rio, Texas.
(Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
“The top 1% put the American Dream behind a paywall,” said the Texas Democrat as he unveiled a framework for his economic vision.
Politicians from both sides of the aisle have come to realize in recent years that “affordability” and “cost of living” are key issues voters want to hear about on the campaign trail, with nearly all respondents to a Harris Poll last month reporting they believe the US is currently in an affordability crisis.
But on Wednesday, before 1,300 Texans in the city of Arlington, state Rep. James Talarico (D-50), the Democratic US Senate candidate, contextualized the crisis for voters.
Talarico provided a history lesson that explained how—while his opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, has blamed the Biden administration for rising costs and the struggles of working Texans—“this affordability crisis isn’t something that happened over the last five years. This affordability crisis has been 50 years in the making.”
While introducing his economic platform, “The New American Dream,” Talarico held the audience’s attention as he explained the Powell Memo—a document formally titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” which Virginia-based corporate lawyer Lewis Powell wrote in 1971 for his client, the US Chamber of Commerce.
The memo, said Talarico, provided “a blueprint for how corporations could amass political power, reverse the gains of the Great Society and the New Deal, and rig the system for themselves.”
“The Powell memo outlined a strategy. Unite corporate special interests, privilege corporate perspectives in the media, appoint sympathetic judges to the court, and buy politicians in both political parties,” continued Talarico. “And it worked. Republicans and some Democrats sold the false gospel of trickle-down economics.”
.@JamesTalarico: 50 years ago, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell circulated a memo around DC — a blueprint for how corporations could amass political power, reverse the gains of the Great Society and the New Deal, and rig the system for themselves.
In the memo, Powell—who was appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon just months after he delivered the blueprint to the powerful Chamber of Commerce—outlined how the interests of corporate America should be framed as “individual freedom” that the country must protect.
Private companies should use political influence “aggressively and with determination” to stop “the stampedes by politicians to support any legislation related to ‘consumerism’ or to the ‘environment,’” wrote Powell, and should show no “reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose” the corporate effort.
“Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations,” the memo argued.
“Trickle-down economics is not a theory, it is theft.”
The result of that “long-range planning” and “consistency of action over an indefinite period of years,” said Talarico, is the current political system—in which corporate interests pour billions of dollars into elections to support favorable candidates, Congress passes massive tax breaks for billionaires, and working families are left struggling to afford healthcare, childcare, and other essentials.
“Trickle-down economics is not a theory, it is theft,” he said. “Since the late 1970s, megadonors and corporate special interests have been buying politicians in both political parties. And then those politicians turned around and rigged the economy to benefit their wealthy donors at our expense. We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.”
He added that five decades after the Powell Memo, “the top 1% put the American Dream behind a paywall”—pointing to the extreme wealth of tech CEOs like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, while “one in five Texaschildren live in poverty.”
The American Dream has become an American Nightmare.
It’s too expensive to buy a home. It’s too expensive to get married and have kids. It’s too expensive to retire comfortably.
David Sirota of The Lever, whose team produced the award-winning 2024 podcast “Master Plan,“ which details the history and influence of the Powell Memo, applauded Talarico for speaking directly to voters about the long history behind today’s ”affordability crisis.“
“Talarico is recounting—and promising to fight—the master plan that we exposed. And he’s making that promise in one of America’s most high-profile Senate races,” said Sirota.
Talarico’s event in Arlington marked the beginning of a monthlong tour across Texas in which he plans to roll out his plans to begin reversing the decades of damage done by the Powell Memo and politicians from both major parties who have prioritized corporate interests over working Americans.
The candidate’s agenda includes raising the minimum wage; closing billionaire tax loopholes and ending tax breaks for the top 1% of earners in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act; passing universal childcare; permanently expanding the child tax credit; passing an anti-corruption package to ban super political action committees; and providing down payment assistance for first-time home buyers.
“People are working hard every day,” said Talarico. “They’re playing by the rules. But those rules of today weren’t written for us. They were written for billionaires.”
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The owner of the Krishna Hotel said he would be open to master leasing the building to the city if the city is interested. Photo by Nik Altenberg.
This is part of our ongoing coverage of 16th and Mission. Click here for a dashboard of crime statistics updated daily, and read an archive of past coverage here.
In the housing eco-system around 16th and Mission Streets, single room occupancy hotels show both the promise of empty rooms and the confounding obstacles that keep rooms out of reach for homeless residents.
Take the west side of Mission Street between 17th and 16th streets, where six SROs, most built more than a century ago, are situated.
In total, they offer 163 rooms, but over 50 percent of the rooms in half of these hotels have been reported empty for years. Three of the hotels — The Westman Hotel at 2056 Mission St., the Union Hotel at 2030 Mission St. and the Frances Hotel at 2084 Mission St. — have reported vacancy rates of more than 50 percent during the past two years, according to the annual usage reports the hotels submitted to the Department of Building Inspection.
The Westman and Union have reported such rates since 2020.
It would seem an easy fix to fill the rooms up, but city officials and housing advocates say a number of challenges prevent that from happening. From the city’s perspective: building size, access to private bathrooms, working elevators and a lack of funds. For hoteliers, the fear of attracting ‘problematic’ tenants, no real desire to have city inspectors too close and the cost of rehabilitating the units.
When asked why the city hasn’t taken advantage of the vacancies in privately run SROs, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing said in a statement, “While the structure of each agreement may vary, our priorities remain consistent: ensuring that permanent supportive housing provides a healthy, dignified living environment for tenants, with features such as private bathrooms, elevators, community space, on-site case management, and access to public transportation.”
These are challenges not only for the SROs at 16th and Mission, but likely obstacles for many of the city’s 378 privately run SROs.
Those factors, industry insiders said, have kept many vacant rooms from becoming part of the city’s master leasing program, which primarily supplies permanent supportive housing. Currently, the city master-leases 46 single room occupancy hotels across the city, totaling 3,648 permanent supportive housing units, according to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
The city master leases eight buildings while the remaining 38 are master leased through nonprofits using funds from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
While the city now seems to prefer SROs with private bathrooms, many of the SROs it leases or helps master lease are without that feature.
Out of the 46 buildings, 10 have private bathrooms, 13 have shared bathrooms and 23 have a mix of shared and private facilities. ❮❯
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However, Shaw said that the city is currently showing less interest in buildings with units that share bathrooms.
Maybe it shouldn’t be, some suggest.
Dr. Margot Kushel, the director at the University of California, San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, said that permanent supportive housing in single room occupancy hotels, even if these buildings are not in pristine condition, plays an important role in the city’s efforts to house people.
She understands that the cost of providing services in permanent housing can outstrip available financing, she says, and that not every SRO will have all the features the city considers ideal. But Kushel says that SROs are still key for preventing homelessness, and helping people recover from life on the streets.
“There’s no question that as flawed as it is, as imperfect as it is…having a place to call their own, and having the rights and responsibilities of tenancy, has been really transformational for a lot of people,” said Kushel.
Still the city appears to have no immediate plans to master lease new hotels.
Under the Lurie administration, the city received funds for the acquisition and rehabilitation of 1035 Van Ness Ave., a 124-unit permanent supportive housing complex near the Tenderloin, and for the rehabilitation of 835 Turk St., a 112-unit supportive housing complex near Hayes Valley, previously acquired in 2022.
Most of the buildings the city acquired since the pandemic have private bathrooms.
As for master leases, no new agreements have been made since Mayor Lurie took office – only two, one-year renewals in the Tenderloin: The Monarch Hotel at 1015 Geary St., a 96-unit building, and the Adante Hotel at 610 Geary St., a 85-unit building.
But there’s been little activity in the Mission since.
Sam Dodge, who served as the transitional director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing for four months in 2021, explained the slow pace by saying that the city usually is looking to lease buildings with dozens of units. In contrast, the Westman Hotel has 22 rooms, the Union Hotel has 37 rooms and the Frances Hotel has 50 rooms.
Dodge also doubled down on the importance of private bathrooms and reliable elevators as major factors the city considers.
“Old elevators are kind of a liability. The people that we’re trying to house have a lot of disabilities and are older,” said Dodge. “But private baths, oh, boy, that’s very popular.”
This reporter visited five out of the six single room occupancy hotels on Mission street between 16th and 17th street. While most of these were fairly clean, none had private bathrooms or elevators.
Vinay Patel, owner of the Union Hotel, pointed out that adding bathrooms would also diminish the number of rooms. He estimated that the Union, with 37 rooms, would end up with only half that number.
Private bathrooms aside, there are other reasons as well. Dodge said that in many cases hotel owners don’t want to enter master-leasing agreements with the city. For the most part, the city leaves private owners alone, aside from paying a yearly visit for inspection and requiring the hoteliers to submit an annual usage report.
“When the city’s up in your business every day, you’re going to have a lot of inspectors. You’re going to have a lot of people crawling all over it,” said Dodge. “A lot of owners don’t want all that.”
Whitney Jones, the deputy chief of community real estate at Chinatown Community Development Center, agreed. He said that in his 34 years at the nonprofit he’s seen many single room occupancy hotels near Chinatown with high vacancy rates because owners simply chose to keep them empty.
Many of these buildings are already paid off, he said, and owners don’t feel an incentive to lease all the units to the city for supportive housing, preferring instead to rent commercial units on the first floor. Jones pointed to owners’ worries about making improvements to infrastructure, hiring 24-hour front-desk employees, and the constant fear of attracting problematic tenants.
Three owners, plus a person representing the ownership of one of the buildings on the block, said they’d be willing to sit down with the city to talk about master leasing scenarios.
Albert Tam, co-owner of the residential complex at 2044-2046 Mission St. and the Radna Hotel at 2040-2042 Mission St., said he’s putting the properties on the market after nearly 20 years of ownership. Tam said street conditions and a desire to retire have prompted him to make this decision.
Tam said that he’s open to talking with city officials or a nonprofit if there’s interest in master leasing, or buying the two properties for $5 million. As an alternative, Tam said he’s exploring the possibility of building an eight-story building featuring 42 studios with private bathrooms.
The owner of the Krishna Hotel and the manager of the trust of another SRO on the block also said they would be open to selling to the city.
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Reporting from the Mission District and other District 9 neighborhoods. Some of his personal interests are bicycles, film, and both Latin American literature and punk. Oscar’s work has previously appeared in KQED, The Frisc, El Tecolote, and Golden Gate Xpress.More by Oscar Palma
Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor. He opposed the Nazi regime during the late 1930s, and was sent to a concentration camp for his affiliation with the Confessing Church and his opposition to state involvement in Church. Wikipedia
The report shows how employees at Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan helped to hide Epstein’s activities because he was a load-bearing part of their ‘wall of cash.’
Bankers only flagged transactions retroactively in 2019, after authorities arrested Jeffrey Epstein on federal sex trafficking charges. Credit: Jon Elswick/AP Photo
Key executives at Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase routinely ignored the suspicious activities of convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein because he was among their most profitable clients, paying millions in fees and holding influence over other wealthy people, according to a new investigation released on Tuesday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).
The cover-up should prompt lawmakers to strengthen anti–money laundering laws and pass new legislation to hold individual bankers accountable, said Wyden, the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee. The Oregon senator used his report on the multiyear investigation to put the financial services industry on notice that he’s preparing to do just that.
“My investigation showed conclusively that the bankers who served Jeffrey Epstein and his ultra-wealthy friends were far too motivated to protect their cash cow, and had far too little respect for the law,” Wyden told the Prospect via email.
The report looked at thousands of suspicious activity reports, or SARs. Those are confidential documents that banks and other financial institutions must file with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, the U.S. Treasury’s financial intelligence division, when they identify unusual transactions. Executives have 30 days to file a SAR when they suspect things like money laundering or payments to terrorists.
According to Wyden’s report, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase failed to do so for millions of dollars in cash withdrawals that had “no clear business purpose.” Instead, bankers let them ride, and together facilitated more than $1.4 billion worth of suspicious wire transfers over two decades—transactions they only flagged retroactively in 2019, after authorities arrested Epstein on federal sex trafficking charges.
The transactions they hid “included thousands of wire transfers, major withdrawals of cash, payments to women and girls.”
The report names specific bankers who worked for at least one of the three named banks: Paul Barrett, David Brigstocke, Mary Casey, Stephen Cutler, John Duffy, Mary Erdoes, Jane Heller, Jeff Matusow, Paul Morris, Justin Nelson, Stewart Oldfield, Jes Staley, and Karen Weiss.
Staley, a top JPMorgan executive at the time, is the only banker among the group who has faced any consequence for helping Epstein maintain his human trafficking ring; he was forced out as CEO of Barclays. “The rest of the bankers named in this list have faced no known financial consequences or regulatory discipline and remain employed in extraordinarily lucrative positions at JPMC, Bank of America and elsewhere,” the report states.
The transactions they hid “included thousands of wire transfers, major withdrawals of cash, payments to women and girls, and correspondent banking in high-risk foreign jurisdictions (including Russia),” the report states. “They also include tens of millions in payments to his conspirator and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.”
Deutsche Bank and Bank of America both take their legal obligations seriously, spokespeople for both banks said. The Deutsche spokesperson added that the company regrets its past relationship with Epstein, has cooperated with investigations, and has been “transparent in addressing deficiencies and investing in strengthening our control environment in parallel.” Bank of America, meanwhile, “did not facilitate wrongdoing,” the spokesperson said.
A JPMorgan spokesperson failed to respond to a request for comment on the record.
WYDEN TOLD THE PROSPECT that he is “proposing a set of changes to put some teeth into the law so that elite bankers are held accountable for covering up for the Epstein class.” The forthcoming legislation will introduce a new level of accountability that banking executives would face for failing to report suspicious transaction activity, as the bankers who protected Epstein did. It would require senior managers to sign annual attestations confirming that accounts of high-net-worth clients comply with anti–money laundering laws; impose higher fines or prison sentences for individual bankers who fail to promptly report suspicious activity to the Treasury Department; and claw back bonuses paid to executives responsible for violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). It would also require bank executives to disclose to the Treasury Department every time they fire a client for suspicious financial activity or restrict a client’s cash withdrawals or wire transfers.
The legislation will specifically target activity that suggests a bank’s client may be engaged in human trafficking. It would require banks to conduct a greater level of screening for bank accounts that individuals open for unrelated people younger than 25 years old, and require a client to submit to an interview when they want to open an account for a woman younger than 25 years old in another country. And it would encourage professional consequences for participating in human trafficking by giving federal agencies the authority to revoke certain registrations and licenses to accountants and attorneys.
This type of enforcement regime could have provided legitimate accountability in the Epstein case, Wyden believes. He argues that JPMorgan’s termination of Epstein as a client in 2013 illustrates that they knew something was wrong. But the fact that executives waited until 2019 to report more than 5,000 suspicious wire transfers worth well over $1 billion merits further attention. He notes a detail in a legal filing showing that between 2009 and 2014, JPMorgan gained $8.1 million from Epstein “in fees alone,” and was one of the bank’s largest clients.
Wyden’s report also details multiple instances in which powerful figures used their positions to obstruct his investigation. In one glaring example, he described CBS suppressing an interview he did with former 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi in March. That was five months after David Ellison, a Trump ally and child of billionaire Larry Ellison, took over CBS through its parent company Paramount and appointed right-wing pundit Bari Weiss to run the network.
New legislation will specifically target activity that suggests a bank’s client may be engaged in human trafficking.
Wyden discussed his SARs investigation with Alfonsi, and possible consequences for banks, as part of a larger segment on the conduct of Wall Street bankers and the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands. But Weiss fired Alfonsi once Ellison took over. “David Ellison’s handpicked partisan lieutenant killed the segment and fired the lead reporter on the piece,” Wyden told the Prospect.
The experience gave Wyden “a first-hand view of how the far-right takeover of corporate media is protecting predators and standing in the way of justice … Blocking corporate media consolidation and supporting independent media is absolutely vital to defending our democracy and getting justice for ultra-wealthy criminals.”
A spokesperson for CBS did not respond to a request for comment.
MILLIONAIRE TREASURY SECRETARY Scott Bessent is likewise working to stymie Wyden’s SARs investigation, according to the report. Bessent rejected three requests from Wyden to give the Senate Finance Committee copies of Epstein’s bank records, while simultaneously making public statements that the records were “sitting there” and that Treasury’s only job was “simply to collect the reports,” which is a false representation of the department, given that it routinely investigates and fines financial institutions for failing to promptly report suspicious transactions.
Bessent’s fellow Republicans have joined in on undermining Wyden, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who claimed Democrats were stonewalling “efforts to crack the Epstein trafficking ring wide open” while simultaneously rejecting Wyden’s request to support his subpoena of Epstein’s bank records.
Blackburn, who faces a primary election for governor of Tennessee tomorrow, did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to proposing new legislation, Wyden recommends the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and Comptroller of the Currency open investigations into how banks handled Epstein’s accounts and that the Department of Justice open criminal investigations into banks and Epstein’s associates, including his lawyer Darren Indyke and his accountants Richard Kahn and Harry Beller. The current House Oversight Committee investigation should consider subpoenas for the individual bankers named in the report, Wyden argued. And Bessent should turn over all the SARs banks have filed in relation to Epstein.
“The pattern of transactions through Epstein’s accounts was well outside the ordinary course of business. All of the Wall Street banks financing Epstein’s activities knew, or should have known, that his transactions were suspicious,” the report states. “By failing to do exactly what the Bank Secrecy Act requires, these Wall Street bankers enabled unspeakable harm to hundreds of Epstein’s victims.”
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Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07. More by Whitney Curry Wimbish
Next Tuesday’s Senate primary in Minnesota pits another Indivisible-backed fighter, Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, against another establishment-backed moderate flush with outside cash. Let’s make sure people power wins out again.
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It wasn’t the job opportunities that brought him to Harlem. Had he been white, Asa Philip Randolph, then 21 years old, had the kind of background that would have ensured gainful employment when he moved north from Florida in 1911: a stellar academic record, parents who’d made sure he knew not just his Bible but Shakespeare and other classics, an orator’s voice, a quiet though commanding presence, Victorian manners, a moral seriousness.
Randolph understood this meant little to nothing in New York’s job market for Black Americans, where he got work—more accurately, gigs—as a janitor and occasional waiter. That’s not why he’d come to Gotham. He’d come to exercise his acting chops in Black amateur theater clubs; to study politics, economics, and public speaking at City College; and, soon after his arrival, to immerse himself in the socialist movement, then at its Debsian apogee. His minister father disapproved of his acting proclivities. But Randolph found an outlet for his talents on the street corners and soapboxes of Harlem, preaching socialist gospel to Harlem’s Black working class.
Randolph was to remain a socialist soapboxer for the next 60 years, during which he did more to advance the rights and interests of Black Americans than anyone else in the half-century between the heyday of W.E.B. Du Bois and the emergence of Martin Luther King. He also had more impact on America’s laws and social policies than any other avowed democratic socialist in the nation’s history, though we must hope, as Randolph surely would, that the wave of socialists who’ve emerged in the past decade will eclipse him.
Randolph used his ability to rally his supporters to make lasting change for Black America.
During his early soapboxing, Randolph met another young Black socialist, Chandler Owen. The two of them “took up residence in the New York Public Library,” says historian Eric Arnesen, where they read Marx, political economy, history, and sociology. In early 1917, they founded and co-edited The Messenger, a monthly magazine that in bold type proclaimed itself to be “The Only Radical Negro Magazine in America.” It vehemently opposed U.S. participation in World War I, pointing out that if democracy was truly at stake, that was a battle that needed to be fought at home. In 1919, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer labeled the magazine “the most dangerous of all the Negro publications.”
As if Randolph and Owen weren’t already in hot water, they embarked on a national anti-war speaking tour of Black communities. They were arrested in Cleveland and charged, like socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, with subversion. Amazingly, the presiding judge looked at the two twentysomethings and apparently concluded that they were some crazy Black kids who didn’t understand what they’d been talking about. He gave them a lecture and sent them home, not realizing that home was The Messenger’s Harlem office.
IT WASN’T JUST THE WAR against which The Messenger railed. It was capitalism; it was Tammany; it was the Republicans who campaigned in Harlem as Lincoln’s party while doing nothing for Black citizens; it was Black churches that preached submission or accommodation; it was Du Bois’s support for World War I; and in the 1920s, it was Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement, which for many Harlemites combined an assertion of Black pride with a weakness for spectacle and a de facto surrender in the struggle for equality on American soil.
Besides writing and editing The Messenger, Randolph also organized fledgling unions of New York’s elevator operators (almost entirely Black) and Virginia’s Black shipyard workers. Both ventures failed, but in 1925, five Pullman porters called on him to talk about forming a union. In the decades following the Civil War, George Pullman had founded a company that both manufactured passenger railcars and staffed them with servants to meet the travelers’ many needs. That task, he decided, had to be performed with cheerful servility, to which end he employed an all-Black workforce, initially former slaves who’d worked in the homes, not the fields, of their enslavers. Few companies were hiring them at all, and Pullman quickly became the largest employer of Black people in the U.S., remaining so until the late 1930s.
By 1925, it was mostly a younger generation of Black workers who staffed the cars, but the same cheerful servility was required of them, which came complete with low pay and the requirement to work all hours depending on passengers’ needs or whims. (Many porters worked up to 400 hours per month.) Travel broadened the porters’ horizons, even with all the restrictions they encountered at every stop, but nothing broadened the porters’ rights or narrowed their hours or raised their wages. Pullman had established a company-controlled union which provided nothing to improve the porters’ lot. It also deployed a small army of spies to ensure that no real union would arise to challenge it.
A. Philip Randolph talks to newsmen at the Capitol after leaders of the March on Washington met with congressional leaders, August 28, 1963. Credit: AP Photo
Randolph accepted the challenge to head a real union, named the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, riding the rails himself to persuade prospective members with his eloquence and demonstrable commitment. The company’s main mode of union suppression was simple termination: The company fired roughly 800 porters who its spies reported were union supporters.
In 1926, however, the porters became the unintended beneficiary of federal legislation. That year, Congress passed the Railway Labor Act, giving collective-bargaining rights to railroad engineers, conductors, and brakemen—all of whom had all-white unions that avidly enforced their color lines. But the act failed to exclude porters; in 1926, hardly any congressmen even knew there was an effort to unionize them. That opened a door for Randolph and his members, though fear of company reprisal still made unionization a slog.
It took the New Deal for unions to start growing again. Still, few expected the porters to dislodge the company’s “union” with their own. But in 1935, the government conducted an election between the company union and the Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood won by a vote of 5,931 to 1,422. Not since Reconstruction had Black Americans won anything of comparable significance; the Black press rejoiced and hailed Randolph as the pre-eminent Black leader of the day. Even greater recognition followed in 1937, when the Pullman company, after two years of hoping the union could be dislodged, abruptly agreed to the union’s proposals for pay and hours and signed a contract.
By 1940, as the specter of war loomed over America, the government boosted funding for production of arms and aircraft (in which the U.S. was singularly lacking). Suddenly, the rather small corporations that built planes—Lockheed, Douglas, North American, Boeing—were growing exponentially. By January 1941, they employed 107,000 workers, of whom just 240 were Black. Randolph met with President Roosevelt, who said he’d encourage the companies to hire more Black workers, but committed himself to nothing further.
Joined by the union’s gruff vice president, Milton Webster, Randolph boarded a southbound train to meet with various porter locals. The two sat in silence as they contemplated how to persuade FDR to compel the companies to integrate. Finally, Randolph said, “I think we ought to get 10,000 Negroes and march down Pennsylvania Avenue and protest against the discriminatory practices” of the aircraft and other arms companies.
At the time, there’d been no mass protests in Washington since the “Bonus Army” of World War I veterans had demanded immediate payment of their veterans’ benefits in 1932—the pit of the Depression. (President Hoover had deployed the U.S. Army to dispel them.) Marches on Washington to promote lasting policy changes—much less Black marches on Washington, which practiced Jim Crow segregation in virtually all its public facilities—were unheard of. But Randolph and Webster’s visits to Northern state locals yielded so much enthusiastic support, far beyond the members of their union, that by late spring, more than 100,000 Black people had pledged to march, alarming the administration.
Two of Randolph’s most prominent and most liberal white allies—first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia—tried in vain to get him to stop the march, and then compelled him to hold another meeting with FDR. “What was your class at Harvard, Phil?” asked Roosevelt, turning on his fabled charm. Randolph responded by noting his regret that he wasn’t a Harvard man, and told FDR that the Black community had been galvanized and could not be dissuaded from marching, absent an executive order requiring defense contractors to cease racial discrimination in hiring and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce it. Roosevelt acceded, and Randolph then called off the march. Nonetheless, he led a series of mass rallies in major cities for several years thereafter to both mark and publicize this epochal change. And Black citizens, by the thousands and then the millions, moved from the South to Northern and Western cities for the jobs now open to them in defense plants—a demographic shift with huge implications for the nation and its politics.
BY THEN, RANDOLPH WAS RECOGNIZED as the pre-eminent champion of the Black American cause, with the Amsterdam News proclaiming him “ranked along with the great Frederick Douglass.” He used his ability to rally his supporters to make more lasting change for Black America.
As mentor to the emerging postwar generation of Black radicals, he presided over the conception and planning of the first Freedom Rides (integrated bus rides through the Jim Crow South) in 1946, alongside Bayard Rustin and future CORE leader James Farmer—though the plans weren’t carried out until 1961. In 1948, as Congress considered establishing a peacetime draft, he announced he’d counsel young Black men to resist the draft through a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience unless the armed forces were desegregated. As he had with Roosevelt, he met with President Truman, who responded with indignation—before realizing that the movement of Black people to Northern and Western states in response to Randolph’s previous campaign meant that desegregating the armed forces could actually help him win some swing states in the upcoming 1948 election. Truman then signed the desegregating executive order, and in the final week of his come-from-behind re-election campaign became the first president ever to hold a campaign rally in Harlem.
The Messenger was an early, radical magazine that Randolph co-founded; by the 1960s, he graced newsweekly covers and met with presidents like JFK (below). Credit: Black Liberation History Archive/Marxists’ Internet Archive; Library of CongressCredit: UPI/Cecil Stoughton/White House/John F. Kennedy Library
Randolph not only incubated the careers of Rustin and Farmer, but helped hone the political talents of many members of the Brotherhood. One of them, E.D. Nixon, became the leader of the NAACP in Montgomery, Alabama, whose Jim Crow regime, he believed, was vulnerable to the kind of nonviolent confrontational tactics that Randolph had used. Several local Black citizens had provoked arrest by refusing to comply with a requirement on city buses to move to the back, but Nixon declined to call a boycott, until in 1955 he found and deployed a model resister named Rosa Parks. Nixon then dragooned the new minister at the city’s largest Black church—26-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.—to lead the campaign. Randolph’s tutelage continued to shape campaigns.
In late 1962, Randolph told Rustin it might be time to mount a March on Washington. Factory employment was dropping due to increased mechanization, causing Black unemployment to rise. The 1958 elections had greatly increased the number of liberals in Congress, and following the 1960 election, there was again a Democrat in the White House. Moreover, civil rights campaigns in Southern cities against pervasive segregation looked to be hitting a wall. So Randolph announced a march, focused on the provision of jobs that would arrest the urban Black descent into poverty, boosting the prospects of white workers as well.
Then King’s campaign for equal rights in Birmingham, Alabama, exploded as television news showed the local police turning dogs and fire hoses on teens and children who were demonstrating for a decent, desegregated life. President Kennedy was compelled to call for federal legislation striking down racial discrimination in public facilities. “It was a magnificent speech,” Randolph said, “but it was, unfortunately, made rather late.”
King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, then agreed to participate in Randolph’s march, and both the NAACP and the Urban League cautiously agreed to join as well, despite their general aversion to public demonstrations. (NAACP chief Roy Wilkins demanded that Rustin—a liability, he said, for having once been a communist, however briefly, and for still being gay—be removed as the march director. Randolph responded by proclaiming that he’d chair the march himself but keep Rustin as its organizer, to which the boxed-in Wilkins felt compelled to agree.) Kennedy called in the leaders to meet with him in June and, like Roosevelt and Truman before him, asked that they not hold the protest. For the third time, Randolph responded by telling a president that the forces were in motion and could not be deterred.
The march, of course, was a historic success, creating such momentum that the Civil Rights Act that passed the following year went beyond Kennedy’s proposal to include a prohibition on discrimination in hiring—a broader version of the policy Randolph had secured, temporarily, during World War II.
Still a dedicated socialist, Randolph welcomed the Great Society’s War on Poverty, while seeking to remedy its inadequacies by having progressive economists devise the “Freedom Budget” in 1966, which demonstrated how government-backed full-employment policies could truly eliminate American poverty. These policies, of course, have yet to be enacted.
Randolph died in 1979, until his final years still residing in a modest Harlem walk-up apartment. While his life and work have never been totally forgotten, they’ve fallen through the cracks of historical memory. A modest statue of him can be found in Washington’s Union Station, where porters once staffed the railcars. No monument truly reflects the impact of his work and the egalitarian decency it bestowed—provisionally, of course—on his country.
Herewith, then, a modest suggestion: The next time that Democrats control the federal government, they should rename Union Station—that majestic, Daniel Burnham greeting hall of all who come to Washington by rail—after the man who both championed rail workers and led those who flowed through it to march on Washington for justice. The A. Philip Randolph Station.
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