Homage to Norman Thomas
Harrington, Michael & Rustin, Bayard & Randolph, A. Philip
Throughout my life I have drawn much of my inspiration as a socialist from Norman Thomas. I learned from him, as well as from Eugene Victor Debs, that the struggle for racial justice is...
...When the Communist party deserted the Scottsboro boys in their struggle, Thomas was one of those who stepped in and saw the case through to the Supreme Court...
...Throughout my life I have drawn much of my inspiration as a socialist from Norman Thomas...
...Thomas was the symbol of the total American man...
...Long before the social upsurge that began in 1955 around the school boycott, the sit-ins, and the Montgomery bus protest, Thom-as, out of his socialist background, had been consistently working for equality on an even more profound level...
...He would not go back to the old, traditional faith, but then neither would he take consola HOMAGE TO NORMAN THOMAS tion from biblical metaphors...
...There are those to the Right of Norman Thomas who would like to forget that he was committed to the very end to a socialist reconstruction of society...
...Over the years, Thomas was one of the people that I could always depend upon in times of great stress...
...The real way to do honor to Norman Thomas is to join in the struggle to establish the still unachieved ideas to which he dedicated his life...
...Many of the things he advocated forty years ago have not yet been achieved...
...Many of our citizens in this affluent country still suffer from degrading poverty...
...He was also among the few whites who gave vigorous support to the 1941 March on Washington and was in the forefront of the war-time effort to obtain the Fair Employment Practices Committee...
...Norman Thomas dispensed with his prepared remarks and spent his time challenging my conventional radical wisdom...
...It was, to my mind, an act of spiritual and intellectual bravery...
...1...
...now I am sure of it...
...I learned from him, as well as from Eugene Victor Debs, that the struggle for racial justice is organically tied to the struggle for political and economic justice...
...I was not a true believer then but I could, and did, quote from the Marxist scriptures with scholastic gusto...
...Bayard Rustin For over forty years Norman Thomas was one of the leaders in the struggle for social justice in America...
...Even in his younger days as a pastor, he had been something of a non-conformist and he long ago abandoned his ministry...
...During the building of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters I often sought his advice, and he consistently responded with counsel that was both practical and humane...
...As I knew him, he lived the life of the spirit dangerously for he opened himself up to all the confusions and ambiguities of this world, yet never lost his vision of an entirely new order of things...
...Because I had come to the socialist movement via the Catholic Worker and he by the Protestant church, we often talked about religion...
...In 1948, he was one of the first people to support A. Philip Randolph in the fight to eliminate discrimination in the armed forces...
...Even at that time I suspected that he was right to counter my over-orthodoxy...
...I remember about ten years ago when he and I shared a platform at a DISSENT conference...
...But he maintained a profound affection for his religious past and a very real interest in the latest theological developments...
...Whether he was fighting to liberate children from the harshness of the sweatshops or to obtain justice for Sacco and Vanzetti, whether he was striving to protect and extend civil liberties or to further the growth of those two great and interdependent movements for social justice—the civil rights and labor movements—Norman Thomas was always the man on whom all segments of the American population could depend...
...To every project to end racial discrimination and economic inequality he gave counsel, funds, and particularly his personal commitment...
...Yet he was so true to his intellectual convictions that he refused to create any religious consolations for himself...
...He played a major role in the establishment of the CIO which has brought hundreds of thousands of black people out of the lumpenproletariat and into the working class...
...There are those on the Left who cannot understand his intolerance of slogans and blueprints...
...As I understood him, he seemed to feel that God was in his heaven, or was not, and if the latter were true there was not much point in trying to invent sentimental substitutes for him...
...He was as undogmatic, and as deeply serious, on this count as he was in his socialist convictions...
...That tough-mindedness in Norman Thomas persisted courageously as he lay dying...
...At the end, Norman Thomas's mind was clear and perceptive, but his body was assaulted by countless infirmities of sickness and age...
...He was a socialist...
...Yet he had an almost conservative suspicion about some of the newer, symbolic interpretations of Christianity (so do I...
...That was an extremely stoic attitude for a man who knew that he was dying...
...Michael Harrington In many ways Thomas's refusal of any doctrinaire codification of socialism was one of his great strengths...
...We do not yet have free education and free medical care for everybody, full employment, and family allowances...
Vol. 16 • March 1969 • No. 2
