https://quillette.com/2022/08/05/the-limits-of-radical-protest/
Bayard Rustin was one of the towering figures in the American civil rights movement. A democratic socialist and a lead organizer of the March on Washington, Rustin was also among the most forceful and compelling advocates for a sweeping set of social and economic changes intended to bring about what he described as “full racial equality.”
In February 1965—a year and a half after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and just seven months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act—Rustin published an essay in Commentary titled “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement.” This title captured a theme of Rustin’s work in the years to follow—he was a radical pragmatist who believed the campaign for civil rights was the starting point for a much larger struggle: the fight to build a fairer and more just society for all.
Rustin had just witnessed tectonic legal and political changes in the United States when he urged his fellow Americans to embark on this project. As he put it at the beginning of his essay, the “elaborate legal structure of segregation and discrimination, particularly in relation to public accommodations, has virtually collapsed.” But he argued that this merely marked the transition from one phase of economic and social mobilization to the next: “What is the value of winning access to public accommodations for those who lack money to use them? The minute the movement faced this question, it was compelled to expand its vision beyond race relations to economic relations, including the role of education in modern society.”