“Black Leadership … Has the Best Possibility of Pulling Together a New Coalition of Conscience”: African Americans' Efforts to Unify a Progressive Resistance in the 1980s

In the past fifteen years historians have begun to explore the progressive resistance to Reaganism during the 1980s. They have produced a small though rich number of case studies of central american solidarity, feminist, anti-nuclear, gay and lesbian, civil rights and other insurgencies against conservative Democrats and Reagan Republicans. They have not, however, dedicated much attention to how these single-issue struggles interacted with one another and if they made an attempt to create an umbrella organization that could contest for national power. Focusing on the national coalition of African Americans who spearheaded the 1983 March on Washington, this paper explores their efforts to create such a coalition and why this effort, though fruitful, ultimately collapsed.