ABSTRACT
Three events in 1983 symbolised for many Americans the tremendous advances gained by blacks during the previous three decades. In April, black Democratic Congressman Harold Washington was narrowly elected mayor of Chicago, the country’s most segregated city. With an unlikely coalition of blacks, Hispanics, liberal trade unionists, feminists and white leftists, Washington upset a reactionary political machine which had dominated blacks for a half century. On 27 August, about 300,000 Americans (about three fourths of whom were black) staged a successful demonstration in Washington DC under the slogan, ‘Jobs, Peace and Freedom’. Although technically promoted as the ‘Twentieth Anniversary’ celebration of the historic march of 1963 led by Martin Luther King Jr, the political programme was significantly further left of the earlier mobilisation, linking the issues of full employment, the necessity for massive cuts in defence expenditure and an end to US intervention in Central America. Finally, the sudden emergence of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson as a possible candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination threw political leaders of both parties into disarray. Political analysts noted that black voters now comprise over one fifth of the normal Democratic Party electorate and that any massive registration drive within black communities would probably determine the 1984 elections, just as blacks had been a decisive component of Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976.
