Reframing Randolph
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Reframing Randolph

Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph

Andrew E. Kersten, Clarence Lang

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Reframing Randolph

Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph

Andrew E. Kersten, Clarence Lang

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Atone time, Asa Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was a household name. As president ofthe all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), he was an embodimentof America’s multifaceted radical tradition, a leading spokesman for BlackAmerica, and a potent symbol of trade unionism and civil rights agitation fornearly half a century. But with the dissolution of the BSCP in the 1970s, theassaults waged against organized labor in the 1980s, and the overall silencingof labor history in U.S. popular discourse, he has been largely forgotten amonglarge segments of the general public before whom he once loomed so large.Historians, however, have not only continued to focus on Randolph himself, buthis role (either direct, or via his legacy) in a wide range of social,political, cultural, and even religious milieu and movements. The authors of Reframing Randolph have taken Randolph’s dusty portrait down fromthe wall to reexamine and reframe it, allowing scholars to regard him in new,and often competing, lights. This collection of essays gathers, for the veryfirst time, many genres of perspectives on Randolph. Featuring both establishedand emergent intellectual voices, this project seeks to avoid both hagiographyand blanket condemnation alike. The contributors represent the diverse waysthat historians have approached the importance of his long and complex careerin the main political, social, and cultural currents of twentieth-centuryAfrican American specifically, and twentieth-century U.S. history overall. Thecentral goal of Reframing Randolph isto achieve a combination of synthetic and critical reappraisal.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2015
ISBN
9780814764640
1
A Reintroduction to Asa Philip Randolph
ANDREW E. KERSTEN AND CLARENCE LANG
We’ve lost touch with Asa Philip Randolph (1889–1979). Nothing points to our collective disregard for him more than the predicament surrounding a statue bearing his likeness. For decades, a bronze rendition of Randolph stood watch over train travelers near the information desk at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. In a recent online story for the New Republic, journalist Timothy Noah reported that this bronze memorial to one of the nation’s leading civil rights and labor rights heroes had been shoved into a corner close to the men’s room. “There was A. Philip Randolph,” wrote Noah, “pushed unceremoniously into a corner by the loo, as if he were there to dispense towels.”1 Officials at the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) objected to Randolph’s unceremonious removal from the concourse. After promises were made to put the statue in a better location, it was dragged close to the popular Starbucks coffee shop. Union Station managers thought better and decided to move it again, this time outside the station’s Barnes and Noble bookstore. But when workers started to slide him toward his new home, the base of the statue began to crack. Until that is fixed, Randolph will remain the guardian of premium coffee. No one seems to be too concerned at this indignity to Randolph’s historical memory, or even that he now largely exists as a monument and not an informative voice from the past.
At one time, A. Philip Randolph was a household name. Both revered and reviled, he was nevertheless known and respected by millions. As president of the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), he was an embodiment of America’s multifaceted radical tradition, a leading spokesman for Black America, and a potent symbol of trade unionism and civil rights agitation for nearly half a century. But with the dissolution of the BSCP in the 1970s, the assaults waged against organized labor since the 1980s, the overall silencing of labor history in U.S. popular discourse, and the reduction of the civil rights movement to the iconography of Martin Luther King, Jr., he has been generally forgotten by large segments of the public before whom he once loomed so large. The overarching goal of this collection of essays on Randolph is to interject him back into historical and historiographical debates about the political, social, and economic movements of the twentieth century. While the origins of Reframing Randolph stem from a 2010 roundtable on “A. Philip Randolph, Black Labor, and the African American Working-Class Public,” assembled by the coeditors for the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, at a more personal level, this project is also a result of the editors’ own conflicting views about Randolph’s triumphs and failures, strengths and weaknesses. These differences, which have unfolded over the course of a decade-long friendship, persist even as our friendship has deepened.
Indeed, historians have labored for decades to detail and interpret Randolph’s life and career, and this scholarly work has developed in several generally overlapping trends. One genre of literature, represented in the work of scholars such as Jeffrey B. Perry (2009) and Minkah Makalani (2011), has highlighted Randolph’s activities in the Harlem radicalism of the “New Negro” period of the 1910s and 1920s. Another, characterized by Jervis Anderson (1973), Manning Marable (1980), Jack Santino (1989), Paula Pfeffer (1990), and Andrew E. Kersten (2006), has taken the form of fuller political and historical biographies of Randolph, and come to include oral testimonies of the porters he stewarded. With some exceptions, like that of Marable, most of this writing has been more sympathetic than critical. Yet another body of scholarship, typified by Herbert Garfinkel (1959), William H. Harris (1977), Keith P. Griffler (1995), Melinda Chateauvert (1998), Andrew Kersten (2000), Eric Arnesen (2001), Beth Tompkins Bates (2001), and Larry Tye (2005), has focused on the broader organizational and policy legacies of the black protest vehicles that Randolph helped to build and lead, exploring their impact on subsequent black freedom struggles. Sometimes laudatory, other times critical, these works have highlighted the inequalities of gender and the dynamics of class and race embedded in the practices and politics of the formations in which Randolph was immersed. A final historiographical trend regarding Randolph and his organizations has recently emerged, as evident in a flurry of new work by such scholars as Cynthia Taylor (2005), Clarence Lang (2009), Cornelius L. Bynum (2010), William P. Jones (2010), and Erik S. Gellman (2012), as well as in forthcoming projects by such scholars as David Lucander and Robert L. Hawkins. More thematic in their emphases, these works build on the previous bodies of literature in providing finer grained analyses of the locally oriented and community-based initiatives of Randolph’s national formations, while at the same time decentering and even castigating Randolph himself. Unlike previous historiographical waves, this new trend has explored the religious foundations of his politics and the folk culture discourses from which he drew his rhetoric.
In a parallel development, moreover, Randolph has slowly become a fixture in filmic representations of civil rights and labor movements. Archival footage of Randolph has been featured in Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle, the 1982 documentary film about the porters, produced by Jack Santino, as well as in a 1987 episode of Henry Hampton’s Eyes on the Prize PBS series, recounting the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. More recently, California Newsreel has produced a full-length documentary, A. Philip Randolph: For Jobs and Freedom (1996). Indeed, Randolph has even been portrayed by actor Andre Braugher in director Robert Townsend’s made-for-cable feature film about the BSCP’s early union-building campaign, 10,000 Black Men Named George (2002).
Because of the diverse and growing body of work on and about Randolph, then, the moment is ripe for both a reintroduction to him and a revision and reinterpretation of his legacies. This collection of essays brings together disparate waves of scholarship in a manner that reflects both a synthesis and critical reassessment of this once towering historical figure, while avoiding both hagiography and blanket condemnation. In gathering for the very first time many perspectives on Randolph produced by both established and emerging scholars, this volume presents the diverse ways that historians are approaching Randolph’s long and complex career in the main political, social, and cultural currents of twentieth-century African American history and twentieth-century U.S. history overall. To achieve this synthetic and critical reappraisal, the authors in this anthology explore Randolph’s biography in detail along with his influences on the civil rights and labor movements.
* * *
A brief summary of his life will help introduce the subject of this volume to the reader. Randolph was born on April 15, 1889, in Crescent City, Florida, the second son of Elizabeth and James William Randolph. Named by his parents after the Old Testament king known for his altruism and selflessness, Asa never disappointed. He and his brother, James, had a typical upbringing in the South. Despite loving parents and a comfortable though very modest home, their lives were indelibly influenced by circumstances of birth: They were African Americans reared at a time, and in a place, that denied them citizenship and equal protection under the law. Being black gated their hopes, hemmed in their aspirations, and closed most windows of opportunity. To help propel their sons out of this misery, James and Elizabeth put great emphasis on education. Asa and James excelled at school, first at the Cookman Institute and later at the City University of New York. In New York City, Asa Philip Randolph became A. Philip Randolph, the radical activist. Inspired by his professors and the political movements and leaders of the day, Randolph joined the Socialist Party, began lecturing on street-corner soapboxes, and forged relationships that allowed him to fight for civil rights and labor rights. During this time of radical transformation and activism, he fell in love with, and later married, Lucille Campbell Green. She shared Randolph’s socialist politics, and through her earnings as a beauty parlor entrepreneur, she provided the financial as well as the emotional support that allowed her spouse to pursue the goal of a more racially, politically, and economically egalitarian society. Their union produced no children, but they would remain dedicated partners for nearly fifty years until Lucille’s death in July 1963.
The most important aspects of Randolph’s early career as an activist centered on the publication of his radical magazine, the Messenger, which he created and edited with Chandler Owen, an African-American writer and left-wing radical. In 1925, his efforts to reshape the political culture caught the eye of a young black militant, Ashley Totten, who worked on passenger cars as a porter for the Pullman Company. Life for porters was rewarding but unnecessarily difficult. In an era when higher paying jobs were simply out of the question for most African American workers despite education and “respectability,” employment with the Pullman Company was financially beneficial. In fact, working for Pullman helped many black families reach middle-class status, as well as creating revenue that elevated the economic status of thousands of African Americans. Yet the cost of working as one of George Pullman’s “boys” was that porters had to endure all sorts of prejudice and discrimination while they waited on passengers. To a man, many were known only as “George,” an appellation that denied the porters’ their personal identity and reinforced longstanding expectations of black servility and subordination to white “masters.” Although they received wages, the porters were expected to hustle for tips. Moreover, while they often performed the tasks of conductors (who were always white), they never received similar pay. Porters also resented the omnipresent company spies who harassed them with white glove tests to measure cleanliness. The company took a hard line against unionism, and any talk of organizing resulted in immediate termination. Many porters had tried for years to fight back, but Pullman officials had successfully responded through threats of termination and blacklisting. This was where Randolph came in. As an outsider who had never worked for Pullman, he was not immediately vulnerable to company retaliation. And as a freelance radical seeking a base for creating change, Randolph saw an opportunity to put into action his strong convictions about the promise of black protest, the working class, and unions to remake America.
In 1925, Randolph and a cadre of porters formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (BSCP). Recruiting and retaining members of this fledgling union were no easy tasks. An aborted strike in 1928 tested the morale and tenacity of the BSCP membership, the rank and file’s faith in Randolph’s decision-making, and the nascent relationship between the union and the AFL. Company officials tried to intimidate those porters who joined the BSCP, and physical violence followed where threats and economic reprisals failed. Company officials even tried to bribe Randolph to abandon his efforts, literally offering him a blank check to betray the porters. None of these anti-union countermeasures worked. Despite several years when the Brotherhood teetered on the brink of complete ruin, Randolph and men like Totten and Milton P. Webster, who was the BSCP’s Chicago organizer, kept the faith. In 1937, their diligence paid off, and the Pullman Company signed a contract with the nation’s first all-black labor union. BSCP leaders quickly secured advances in wages and respect for their members. The price of this triumph, however, was the abandonment of the Pullman maids, who served the sleeping cars in a capacity similar to their hotel counterparts. This concession to the Pullman Company was part of an expedient maneuver by the Brotherhood’s leadership to obtain a union contract and to garner the AFL membership that was critical to the union’s survival. In turn, maids were relegated to the BSCP’s women’s auxiliaries and other supportive roles behind the porters.
Randolph and the BSCP used their new burgeoning power and prestige to lead wide-ranging black freedom campaigns. Elected president of the newly formed National Negro Congress (NNC) in 1936, Randolph helped to galvanize a broad coalition of labor, civil rights, civic, and religious groups to fight racist practices within the New Deal agencies of the Depression era, organize black support for unionization, and strike down legal U.S. racial apartheid. The exposure contributed greatly to Randolph’s national stature as a major black spokesman whose prominence extended far beyond labor politics. It also created challenges for him, as Randolph was often caught between competing social movements. For instance, in 1940, amidst accusations that the NNC was infiltrated if not dominated by the Communist Party, Randolph, who opposed Communism, reluctantly resigned from the NNC presidency. Undaunted by setbacks within the movement for civil rights, he continued to organize at the national level. The onset of World War II, gave him, his union, and his supporters another political project on which to focus their attention and energies. Their agenda included two main items: 1) equal employment opportunity; and 2) desegregation of the U.S. armed forces.
At the time, African Americans were usually excluded from most jobs except those that were hot, heavy, dirty, and dangerous. Similarly, opportunities for African Americans in the military were severely limited. In the Army, they were segregated into their own separate units, which were led by white commanders. In the Navy, they were assigned only to scullion duties. Prior to the war, there were no African American pilots in the military. Like most black Americans, Randolph was insulted at the self-congratulatory notion that the United States was—as President Franklin D. Roosevelt pronounced—the “arsenal of democracy.” Would a democracy deny the contributions of millions of patriotic, loyal African Americans who wanted to help defend the world in an apocalyptic showdown against fascism?
To force President Roosevelt to take action against racial discrimination in American life, Randolph called for 100,000 African Americans to march on Washington on July 1, 1941. The organizational backbone for this march was the BSCP, which was one of the primary underwriters of Randolph’s new black protest project, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM). President Roosevelt watched this development carefully, given that such a demonstration presented a political and diplomatic embarrassment. Moreover, the prospect of even a fraction of the promised 100,000 African Americans protesting racial inequality within the confines of a segregated city presented a danger because whites in Washington, D.C., might respond violently. In the interest of averting a political disaster—and because he was personally more committed to civil rights than almost all of his predecessors—Roosevelt met with Randolph and struck a deal. Randolph agreed to call off his march on Washington, and the president issued Executive Order 8802 outlawing employment discrimination in the defense industries and in civilian agencies of the federal government. To enforce the order, Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), the first federal civil rights agency since Reconstruction. This temporary New Deal agency became the model for nearly all federal, state, and local civil rights agencies. Nonetheless, Randolph himself suffered the slings and arrows of critics within the black press and of detractors within the MOWM itself, who criticized him for calling off the march, questioned his militancy, and pondered whether he even trusted his own base.
In exchange for the executive order, Randolph had to agree to take off the table the desegregation of the military, at least for the time being. Immediately following the war, however, he began to push harder than ever to make the military more reflective of the democratic ideals that its soldiers ostensibly had defended. Working with a younger and team of activists, who were eligible for the draft, he pressured President Harry S. Truman with the threat of a massive civil disobedience campaign that included active resistance to conscription. Once again, Randolph’s peaceful but forceful prodding worked. In 1948, President Truman issued two executive orders effectively ending segregation in federal employment and the military. For the second time, Randolph’s threatening the Oval Office with massive public protests to gain increased rights for African Americans proved successful. In achieving these reforms, further, his initiative converged with the major social transformations of Black America—namely, mass migration, urbanization, and institution-building, as well as the aspirations unleashed by global depression and two world wars and the growing strength of a northern black electorate.
Not content to rest on his laurels, in the postwar period, Randolph continued to pressure American political leaders for civil rights reform to desegregate public schools and end job discrimination, and to these ends, he conducted several well-publicized but largely ineffectual public demonstrations. The zenith of his postwar career began when he led the creation of the Negro American Labor Council (NALC), which he imagined as both a challenge to the deep-seated racism within the recently merged AFL-CIO and a means of asserting an explicitly labor-oriented economic agenda within the civil rights movement.
While barely made any inroads with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, President John F. Kennedy proved to be more sympathetic to the plight of black Americans. Sensing that he could push Kennedy as he had cajoled Roosevelt, Randolph again planned a march on Washington. Unlike the 1941 march, this demonstration took place. On August 28, 1963, an elderly Randolph finally had his day in the sun, leading more than 200,000 to the foot of the Lincoln Memorial to hear speeches, songs, and prayers from that generation’s leading activists, musicians, and religious leaders. Most famously, this demonstration gave a platform to Martin Luther King, Jr., whose “I Have a Dream” speech has become synonymous with the “golden years” or “heroic period” of America’s civil rights movement. Much of the positive legislative advancements of the 1960s, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, stemmed from this demonstration—the largest in American history to that date—and Randolph’s activism.
By the middle of the 1960s, though, Randolph was slowly retiring from public life. The civil rights movement that he had helped create had moved in different directions. The old Socialist no longer seemed relevant, and his ideas about the importance of labor unions seemed out of place and time as America’s urban production centers experienced deindustrialization. Nothing demonstrated this more than the 1968 Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy, a dramatic community fight over local school control in which Randolph backed unionized white teachers against that city’s grassroots African American activists. This was Randolph’s last major fight. He lived out the rest of his life quietly in New York City under the care of a few close friends, most notably Bayard Rustin (a frequent political partner since the 1940s), until he passed away on May 16, 1979.
Although the average American no longer associates the achievements of the civil rights movement with Randolph, he nonetheless transformed politics and society in the United States, and did so through tenacious lobbying and nonviolent direct action. His quiet revolution brought America closer to realizing its cherished democratic ideals, and his life spanned generations of the African American struggle to bring the country closer to its professed democratic, egalitarian ideals.
* * *
This is the standard—somewhat hagiographic—biography, and it serves as our point of departure. In the chapters that follow, the contributors not only expand the scope of Randolph’s biography, but also challenge some of its central tenets as well as our understanding of Randolph himself. We begin with Joe William Trotter, Jr.’s historiographical essay, which provides a framework for understanding Randolph’s controversial career. As Trotter notes, the initial scholarly attention on Randolph was not unanimously positive. In their important book, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (1931), economists Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris judged Randolph harshly. In the middle of his twelve-year battle with the Pullman Company, the unionist David had not yet slayed the corporate Goliath, and his weaknesses and blind spots were quite evident. These included his focus on publicity, his seeming insensitivity to black working-class culture and religion, and his willingness to work with, and within, the AFL despite the marked racism of its leadership and the rank and file. Success, however, had a way of silencing the critics. For nearly fifty years, scholars and activists from Brailsford R. Brazeal to Paula Pfeffer trumpeted Randolph’s laurels. More recently, scholars have taken a more critical stance, reflecting current historiographical concerns about women, gender, working-class culture, radical and community politics, and religion. In these contexts, Randolph’s legacy has become more complicated.
Eric Arnesen’s chapter refocuses our attention on Randolph the young socialist radical struggling to make a name for himself in New York City and shape the politics of the Progressive Era. Digging deeply into Randolph’s formative years in Florida and his encounters with socialism, Arnesen argues that Randolph’s political stance was a mix of socialist beliefs (often idiosyncratic ones) and African American protest traditions. Randolph’s radicalism was also not terribly original or firmly set. Nonetheless, his politics opened a world of activism and possibility. It was an...

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