A. Philip Randolph

The Religious Journey of an African American Labor Leader

Cynthia Taylor

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780814782873
• eBook ISBN: 9780814738283
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Important insights into the life and mind of one of the most significant civil rights leaders of the twentieth century

A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was one of the most effective black trade unionists in America. Once known as "the most dangerous black man in America," he was a radical journalist, a labor leader, and a pioneer of civil rights strategies. His protegé Bayard Rustin noted that, "With the exception of W.E.B. Du Bois, he was probably the greatest civil rights leader of the twentieth century until Martin Luther King."

Scholarship has traditionally portrayed Randolph as an atheist and anti-religious, his connections to African American religion either ignored or misrepresented. Taylor places Randolph within the context of American religious history and uncovers his complex relationship to African American religion. She demonstrates that Randolph's religiosity covered a wide spectrum of liberal Protestant beliefs, from a religious humanism on the left, to orthodox theological positions on the right, never straying far from his African Methodist roots.

1
One of the Sons of African Methodism

When Asa Philip Randolph was a nine-year-old boy in Jacksonville, Florida, his father, “a highly racially conscious” African Methodist Episcopal minister, aborted the lynching of a black man charged with molesting a white woman. The Reverend James Randolph, aided by his wife, Elizabeth, organized a few community members to stand vigil all night at the local jail to protect the man. In the late 1890s, the Jacksonville black community was incensed over a general wave of antiblack propaganda and activities, especially by the lynch mobs organized by the local Ku Klux Klan. When the Klansmen saw Rev. Randolph and his companions walking up and down the sidewalk in front of the jailhouse late at night and fully armed, they stopped immediately, consulted with one another, and left. Randolph recalled how “all of a sudden they decided that something was important for them to do somewhere else.” Meanwhile, Elizabeth Randolph sat up all night at home with a rifle across her lap, ready to shoot anyone who tried to harm her or her two young sons. This incident taught the young Asa Randolph that if “a people who [were] victims of racial hatred and persecution” united to protect themselves against injustice by standing firmly and holding their ground, “in the long run you’ll win.” When asked whether his family feared reprisals from this incident, Randolph replied, “We were always armed” and “Our father, though a preacher, was … determined to protect his family, and he … stood his ground.”¹

This incident instilled in Randolph a lifelong admiration of the militant Christian message of African Methodism in the closing days of Reconstruction. It also was why, more than sixty years later, Randolph still identified himself as “one of the sons of African Methodism.” The emergence of African Methodism in the postwar South gave the Randolph family strength and dignity, important values for people in the early years of Emancipation. James and Elizabeth Randolph impressed on young Randolph their religious conviction of the importance of working collectively and solving problems in “this world” rather than in the next, and the right to human dignity and self-defense. Years later, when recalling the lynching attempt in his hometown, Randolph found it amazing that “there was complete silence…. Nobody talked about it. No writing in the newspapers.” This incident, however, remained with the few determined people who stood their ground with Rev. Randolph that night against another southern lynching. Randolph grew up determined not to remain silent about the injustices inflicted on African Africans, and this determination shaped the course of his life.²

Randolph said nothing affected him as deeply as his relationship to the AME Church. He and his brother “grew up under it and in it, and our father was a part of it, and our mother was quite religious.” His parents’ African Methodist values included love and devotion to family, the importance of church affiliation, a sense of dignity and pride in oneself and one’s race, the necessity of fighting and demanding civil rights as being integral to possessing human dignity—not just independently but also collectively and as a community—and love and admiration for learning and education. These values provided the foundation for Randolph’s lifelong commitment to fighting racial prejudice and conditioned him for a life of service to others. As a young man, he dreamed about “carrying on some program for the abolition of racial discrimination” because his generation had an obligation to engage in pursuits that would benefit all people, regardless of color. “I got this from my father,” Randolph observed, “that you must not be concerned about yourself alone in this world.”³

In 1889, when Asa Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida, the state legislature enacted a poll tax and instituted a voting system of separate ballot boxes which voters, especially new black voters, found confusing. Authorized by the new state constitution of 1885, voting practices like these were Florida’s first steps toward abolishing the Reconstruction constitution of 1868, which challenged the basic Jeffersonian and Jacksonian values of antebellum days: limited government, decentralization of power, strong local authority, and white supremacy. The Reconstruction constitution created a strong executive who appointed the cabinet and county officials, enfranchised blacks, and established a system of public schools and institutions for the insane, blind, and deaf. Nonetheless, the majority of Floridians viewed the 1868 constitution as a failure and part of the most “ignominious era in the history of the state,” which tainted everyone and everything associated with it. With the poll tax as the central issue at the 1885 constitutional convention, Florida’s Democrats reconfigured the legislative apportionment that favored small counties, thus eliminating blacks and Republicans from the political process altogether. The effect of the poll tax was felt immediately: whereas in 1888, the Republicans won 26,000 votes, by 1890, they could count on only 5,000. By 1900, the Republican Party was dead in Florida, and the reigning political order was based on a one-party system and Jeffersonian values.⁴

In 1891, the Randolph family—Asa, his parents, and his brother—moved to Jacksonville, one of three large urban areas in Florida. The move was part of a larger black migration to southern cities in the decades after Emancipation. As blacks flooded into Jacksonville to take advantage of cheap land and economic opportunities during Reconstruction, the city became a focal point for African American hopes and Northern reformers’ efforts. Before the Civil War, the free black population, about 9 percent of the city’s total black population, lived in the segregated residential area known as “Negro Hill.” During this period, both free and enslaved blacks made up the bulk of the local workforce performing the semiskilled and unskilled tasks of an urban economy. After the war, as in other southern urban centers, black working-class neighborhoods were established on the periphery of the commercial districts. By the 1880s, there were eight black neighborhoods on Jacksonville’s northeast side, compared with the one neighborhood before the war. Residential segregation continued after the war, with white-owned wharves, businesses, and warehouses surrounding the black communities. Former slaves joined free blacks in their own independent society, in which churches, mainly Protestant, were the centers for an increasingly diverse community of institutions. Blacks built their own educational institutions. Schools supported by religious denominations included Florida Baptist Academy; Boylan Home Industrial Training School for Girls, whose courses included college preparatory classes and grammar school education; and Cookman Institute, a Methodist institution that significantly affected the young Randolph’s life.⁵

Jacksonville’s blacks accepted segregation in residency and education, but political segregation remained unacceptable. Scholars of Florida’s history note that “Reconstruction died a slow death in Jacksonville.” The size and strength of the African American community made it difficult for the Democrats to “redeem” the city quickly. In fact, between 1887 and 1889, the only delegates representing Jacksonville in the Florida House were African American. It was not until 1907, the year that Randolph graduated from high school, that black political fortunes declined in the city because of changing political conditions. Therefore, from the time that young Asa Randolph moved to Jacksonville in 1891 until his high school graduation, he did not come under the sway of the Jim Crow system. Instead, it was the later development of Jim Crow in Jacksonville after 1907, in contrast to the earlier black expectations of the southern political reconstruction, that later radicalized Randolph.⁶

The failure of the Republican reconstruction in Jacksonville eventually drove Asa Randolph out of the South in 1911, but not before he had experienced its successes, which positively influenced the rest of his life. During his childhood, Randolph had a taste of the real hope and possibilities that Reconstruction offered to formerly enslaved people, and he spent the rest of his life trying to recapture this hope, as personified in the life of an influential Jacksonville politician, Joseph E. Lee. From the late 1860s until the 1890s, Lee, who held the position of deputy port collector in Jacksonville, was known as the “Chief Ring Negro lieutenant” in Florida’s Republican Party. In the early 1890s, Asa’s father took him and his brother James to a political meeting held out in the open. The two boys were so young that Rev. Randolph had to carry them to the meeting. On the platform sat twenty-five to thirty people, all white, “except one man,” Joseph E. Lee, who chaired the meeting and “made the introductory remarks.” Randolph described him as “a fine type of person … [with] the spirit of an artist … [who] spoke well.”⁷

Along with Lee’s political standing in the community, Randolph was equally impressed by the fact that he was a minister. Rev. Lee was the minister of Mount Olive Church, the African Methodist Episcopal church that his mother attended in Jacksonville. Because James Randolph was the minister for several rural churches outside Jacksonville, the Randolph children attended Rev. Lee’s church with their mother. Consequently, Lee made a dual impression on the young Randolph, from both the political world introduced to him by his father and the religious world identified with his mother. From an early age, Randolph studied Rev. Lee’s deliberate, quiet speech and diction. Asa and his brother listened carefully to the sermons, because they had been “trained … to know when someone was using the wrong term.” Because Lee had an outstanding reputation in both the city and the state, Randolph imagined that if he had not been the collector of the port, he might have become a bishop, because he was educated.⁸

By taking his sons to political meetings, Rev. Randolph instilled in them a sense of pride in their African heritage. From his father, Randolph also learned that some of the great men in history were men of color. Besides citing historical figures like Hannibal, Crispus Attucks, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Richard Allen, and Henry McNeal Turner, the Reverend Randolph could also point to the living example of Joseph E. Lee. Rev. Randolph used Lee’s political position as an example to his sons, saying, “Now, here is a … Negro … serving as the chairman of an important political meeting.” More impressive to young Asa was the day his father took him to Rev. Lee’s office in Jacksonville, where they were greeted by his secretary, who was “a white girl.” Rev. Randolph’s purpose in taking his sons to Lee’s office was to teach them that they, too, could attain similar positions of authority. Randolph remembered this period in Jacksonville as a time when there was “the feeling and the determination and the spirit … on the part of a number of white people that this attitude of being just to people [was] mandatory.” Randolph recalled other families in Jacksonville’s black community who exhibited the same courage and determination to fight for their rights, because like the Randolphs, they were “deeply racially oriented.”⁹

As the Reconstruction era evolved into the Gilded Age, the number of social, economic, and political opportunities for blacks in Jacksonville declined. The rise of Democratic politics in Florida in the 1880s and 1890s coincided with Florida’s emergence as a modern industrial economy, most notably in the spread of railroads. By 1891, as public lands and grants were handed out to several new railroad companies, 2,500 miles of rail were built in Florida, the start of a new industrial order for the state. Although men like Hamilton Disston and Henry M. Flagler, influential industrialists in Florida history, never held political office, they determined the course of its politics after the 1880s. Indeed, the emphasis on successful industrial capitalists like Flagler overshadowed the social accomplishments of several Northern reformers, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and her brother Charles Beecher; Chloe Merrick Reed and her husband, Governor Harrison Reed; the crusading Methodist minister John Sanford Swaim; and a host of other Yankee schoolteachers, social reformers, aspiring politicians, and enterprising businessmen.¹⁰

As a child, Asa Randolph directly benefited from their reforms. Believing that this generation of reformers had not received proper historical attention, Randolph observed that “the history of New England schoolmarms who came South during the War has yet to be written.” The Jacksonville fire of 1901, a devastating event in the city’s history, obscured Florida’s progressive Reconstruction heritage from a new generation of Floridians adapting to the modern Jim Crow era. That is, in the new postwar era, the Swaims, Reeds, Beechers, and Stowes became “carpetbaggers,” and their efforts for social reform were forgotten. As long as political conditions delayed the arrival of a strict Jim Crow system, Randolph and other blacks benefited from the social, economic, and educational advantages of Reconstruction Florida. If the Jacksonville fire divided the old Florida from the new, certainly the older history of Joseph E. Lee and the Yankee schoolteachers had the most decisive influence on young Asa Randolph. The fire, which physically changed old Jacksonville, symbolized the death of the radical hopes for freedom and equality engendered by the Civil War, ideals that A. Philip Randolph spent his lifetime trying to restore.¹¹

Randolph’s birth in 1889 also coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of African Methodism in the South. Reconstruction enabled African Methodist Episcopal churches to flourish in the South, and Asa was reared in the radical African Methodist tradition practiced by his parents. In honor of the anniversary, the noted AME Bishop Daniel Payne himself presided over a “quarto-centenary” program held at the Mount Zion AME Church in Jacksonville. The May 1890 program included various talks on the founding of African Methodism in east and west Florida; a review of its educational work, especially Edward Waters College; and a special emphasis on the accomplishment of pioneer AME women in east and west Florida, a literal testament to the postwar struggle to establish African Methodism in the South. African Methodists like the Randolph family had personally witnessed great progress since slavery, and they prided themselves on their material and spiritual achievements. They felt connected to the great institution that W. E. B. Du Bois, in the first scientific study of the black church, called “the greatest voluntary organization of Negroes in the world.”¹²

As a young man, Randolph shared with other black leaders and intellectuals of the turn of the twentieth century the conviction that the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with its history dating back to the American Revolution, was a high point in black organizational ability. Du Bois’s study confirmed the black community’s generally high regard for the AME Church in the nineteenth century, praised the Christian Recorder as “the oldest Negro periodical in the United States,” and cited the AME’s board of bishops as the “salt of the organization.” Even when the AME Church lost its preeminent standing within African American religion later in the twentieth century, Randolph’s childhood admiration of the institution remained with him throughout his life. Du Bois noted that the origins of the African Methodist Church “had a tinge of romance,” owing to Richard Allen’s legendary act of walking out of the segregated St. George Methodist Church in Philadelphia in 1787. Randolph, comparing Allen with Martin Luther, declared that Allen’s “action had greater nobility of spirit and entailed more personal sacrifice than that of Martin Luther who nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door at Wittenberg, or when he stood before the Diet of Worms.” Randolph connected personally with the “romance” of African Methodism, since Allen’s “wrath against religious jimcrow … struck a blow for civil rights and first-class citizenship” and served as a role model for his own lifework fighting for black civil rights.¹³

Randolph’s parents and grandparents had lived through the cataclysmic events of the 1860s and the subsequent changes the Civil War brought to the South. When African Americans created their own churches during and after the war, Randolph’s parents chose African Methodism. After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, thousands of black Methodists left the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, although even before the war, many black Methodists worshiped separately within the established white Christian communities. These black Methodists exhibited the characteristics necessary for self-government: a rudimentary sense of group self-consciousness, procedures and methods for decision making, and charismatic group leaders. The war had created a liberal climate that emboldened former slaves to make the final break from the ME Church, South: a black Methodist connection with which to affiliate. Although the initiative taken by southern blacks in establishing African Methodism was a key aspect of the southern black Methodist movement, equally important was the denominational emphasis on racial uplift, education, and political activism as embodied by AME missionaries like James Lynch. Randolph’s parents were the first generation of newly emancipated slaves to participate fully in this religious revolution and transition in the South.¹⁴

James Lynch’s experience in one South Carolina town of eight hundred “colored” inhabitants and two churches, both abandoned by whites during the war, reflected this period of religious transition. Rev. Lynch occupied a church once inhabited by white Episcopalians but now filled with a mixed denomination of black Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. Lynch’s appearance among these ex-slaves as an educated, self-confident black preacher so affected them that he recalled that “the first Sabbath I preached to them, they began to wonder among themselves as to what denomination I belonged.” Since none had heard of the AME Church, Lynch told them he had been instructed to organize an African Methodist church. Except for a few dissenting Baptists, the majority of the mixed congregation voted to join his church, illustrating how missionaries and willing congregations were able to change the southern religious landscape. Moreover, the AME denomination’s highly organized polity, run by ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Religious Journey of A. Philip Randolph
• 1 One of the Sons of African Methodism
• 2 The Messenger: A Forum for Liberal Religion
• 3 The Brotherhood: Religion for the Working Class
• 4 The 1940s March on Washington Movement: Experiments in Prayer Protests, Liberation and Black Theology, and Gandhian Satyagraha
• 5 The Miracle of Montgomery
• Epilogue: The Old Gentleman
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author