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Bayard Rustin, a leader of the civil rights movement, proposes the Freedom Budget.

In 1941, Rustin helped plan the March on Washington Movement to dramatize to President Franklin Roosevelt, and the nation, the circumstances of African Americans. By 1963 the focus of the civil rights movement had shifted. Race relations gave way to economic relations; equality was associated with education, jobs and housing. After 1965, civil rights activists, including Bayard Rustin, no longer believed that an interracial strategy based on moral idealism would end racism. In 1967, the issue of black poverty was at the center of the civil rights movement, when Bayard Rustin put forth his Freedom Budget proposal.