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
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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
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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 fulllength 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
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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 streetcorner 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
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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
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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
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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
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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 labororiented 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,
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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,
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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, workingclass 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 avenue for his impulses to right wrongs and to
change the world for the better. Joining forces with other young radicals like Chandler Owen, he was able to catapult himself into a circle
of black and white radicals in New York City, which for a time not only
put him in close contact with such people as Eugene V. Debs and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, but also gave him the opportunity to express himself formally with the publication of the groundbreaking magazine, the
Messenger, once labeled by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer as the
most dangerous African American periodical of the age. Randolph’s
radicalism was resilient, perhaps through its malleability. He was able
to remain a Socialist despite the internecine fights over World War I
and among black Socialists themselves, a number of whom joined a
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newly consolidated Communist Party. He also stuck with the Socialist
Party despite its mediocre record on the issue of race relations. Yet, by
the late 1920s, as radicalism faded from the political scene, Randolph
turned his attention to other matters, including building a new union.
Nonetheless, the lyrical days of Randolph’s youth provided him with
the intellectual and rhetorical skills to fight the Pullman Company and
challenge several U.S. presidents and a nation to live up to the ideals of
the Declaration of Independence. They also provided him with a political outlook based not on convenience but rather conviction.
In her contribution, Cynthia Taylor explores an often overlooked
and dismissed aspect of Randolph’s personal and philosophical convictions: Christianity. Randolph grew up in a household and community
dominated by African American religious traditions, especially those
of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His parents were people of deep faith, and Taylor maintains that so, too, was their second
son, who, like their first, bore a biblical name. There was a time after
his move to New York City when Randolph professed to be an atheist.
After his radical years, however, Randolph returned to his previously
held beliefs, though the charge of atheism—often used by his critics—
stuck. Thus, Taylor provides a powerful corrective, illustrating not only
Randolph’s religious beliefs but also how he integrated them into his
civil rights work and labor organizing. Randolph’s knowledge of, and
popular appeals to, African American religious traditions helped him
build the BSCP and assemble the March on Washington Movement.
Taylor argues that his use of Christian imagery and thoughts was neither crass nor shamelessly exploitive. Rather, she argues that akin to
Martin Luther King, Jr., Randolph was an adherent of a social gospel
that expanded Americans’ understanding of its ethics and imperatives
by infusing it with Gandhian principles relating to direct action and
nonviolence. Further, Randolph’s credentials for religious activism did
not end with World War II. Indeed, throughout the 1950s and 1960s,
he continued to expand relationships among civil rights activists, labor,
and religious leaders alike.
In addition to political and religious allegiances, Randolph had
clearly defined ideas about gender and culture. As Robert L. Hawkins
argues, Randolph was quite conscious of stereotypes and conventions
of manliness, and in seeking to culturally manipulate them in order to
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improve the social, economic, and political standing of Pullman porters, he made them instrumental in advancing the porters’ “manhood
rights” and the desire for fair pay, union representation, and job opportunities. Randolph recognized that the American political economy
judged most African Americans, particularly men, as indolent slackers. To change that view, Randolph emphasized how the members of
the BSCP were “manly” men deserving of proper wages, benefits, and
working conditions. Unlike tip-taking black street musicians singing or
plucking a banjo for their next meal, the porters were not mendicants.
Randolph wanted them to get living wages and eliminate the degrading
habit of working for tips. Using the Messenger to shape opinions of the
black community and raise the porters to middle-class respectability,
he created a binary opposition between itinerant musicians, on the one
hand, and “respectable” male breadwinners who worked on passenger
trains, on the other. Thus gender, race, and class were at the center of
Randolph’s project of framing the porters as culturally respected men
who took care of their wives and children in a manner consistent with
the ideal of white patriarchy. Randolph’s words resonated with the porters in the Brotherhood and their wives and families, and his tactics
arguably helped build acceptance for the union and his utilization of it
as a platform to help launch the modern civil rights movement.
To Randolph, socialism, manhood rights, and black Protestantism were foundational to a mass movement for justice and equality—
a movement that involved his building large coalitions and umbrella
organizations to execute the changes he desired. Thus, in the 1930s, taking advantage of the spirit of cooperation among various black radicals
and liberals, Randolph helped to establish the National Negro Congress
(NNC). At the same time, however, as Erik Gellman demonstrates in
his essay, these coalitions were never as strong as Randolph needed,
and so the NNC’s history provides a compelling example of the internal
frictions that eventually led Randolph to pursue other strategies for civil
rights reform. The advent of the New Deal, the growth of unions, and
the resurgence of radical politics in America gave him a chance to unite
factions of the civil rights and labor movements. Among the deep divisions were the fights between the Communists and the Socialists, who
vied to capture the hearts and souls of the working-class movements of
the 1930s. There were also fights between the AFL and the CIO, whose
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organizers had conflicting loyalties to skilled artisans and the semiskilled and unskilled workforces of the mass-production industries.
Gellman shows that Randolph, with his radical political credentials and
his growing stature in the AFL, was the man of the hour to lead the
NNC and unite forward-thinking unionists and political activists. Yet,
the center did not hold. Randolph’s own failings as a leader, coupled
with the centrifugal forces driving the split between the AFL and CIO
and his longstanding feuds with Communists, spelled doom for Randolph’s participation in the NNC, which itself was weakened greatly by
his departure. Randolph went on to establish his own vehicle for civil
rights and still worked toward erecting big tents to shelter his allies and
amass a political campaign. As Gellman concludes, Randolph’s coalition groups, such as the March on Washington Movement, were under
his direct control—for better and for worse.
Aside from his intellectual commitments, his tireless organizing, and
his political achievements, we at times see another Randolph in this
volume—one who was less progressive, more hierarchical, and far less
willing to challenge some political and social conventions of his day.
Melinda Chateauvert demonstrates that although Randolph was supportive of women’s equality, his focus remained on African American
men and their ability to enjoy the privileges of first-class citizenship. To
Randolph, these notions translated directly to his approach to organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the March on Washington Movement. Women were instrumental: They helped to provide
the funding, to organize the rallies and speaking engagements, and
to perform the office work. As Chateauvert chronicles, women were
there, but Randolph wanted them to aspire to the respectful secondary
roles that that white women, especially those among the upper classes,
enjoyed. Chateauvert frames her essay around the notions of manhood
rights and dignity, and how the intersection of race and gender influenced Randolph’s choice to maintain rigid sex-based roles for men and
women in his various political projects. This outcome was not merely
a product of his epoch or of his generation. Rather, placing women in
important roles—even though they were defined by sex—ironically
reflected a commitment to their active involvement that was not shared
by all civil rights and labor leaders. Even so, Randolph easily dismissed
and disregarded the work of his women leaders. Nonetheless, the
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experiences Randolph afforded women became proving grounds for a
generation of leaders such as Ella Baker, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and
Rosina Corrothers Tucker.
The particularities of women’s involvement in Randolph’s black protest work also figure centrally in David Lucander’s essay, which focuses
on the March on Washington Movement in New York City and St.
Louis, Missouri. Lucander illustrates that MOWM branches did not
function merely as Randolph’s paper tiger. Rather, they were part of
a grassroots political movement to fight for full citizenship rights for
African Americans. Although many MOWM members were disappointed by the cancelation of the planned 1941 march on Washington,
they organized locally for a possible revival of the idea. And, while they
thought nationally, they acted right where they were. Lucander shows
that local women like Eugenie Settles and Pearl Maddox were instrumental in helping to change political and economic conditions in their
respective cities. Measureable gains were the result of this activism, as
public pressure compelled employers to open their factories to African
American men and women and forced store owners to cater to all customers, not just those who could pass for white. Although it was short
lived, the MOWM at the local level—and the women central to organizing many of its efforts—were agents for change even as they operated within the boundaries of gender norms in the 1940s.
While the MOWM dissolved in the wake of World War II, Randolph’s activities in the areas of fair employment, desegregation of the
military, and racial democratization of organized labor persisted. In
his chapter, William P. Jones focuses on the final major organizational
vehicle Randolph created to mobilize a mass base behind his twin aspirations for civil and labor rights: the Negro American Labor Council
(NALC). Launched in 1960, when Randolph was seventy-one years
old, the NALC, like the BSCP and the MOWM before it, coordinated
efforts to fight racism and discrimination in America generally and
within the labor movement in particular. Jones argues that of the political formations Randolph created, the NALC has been the least studied by civil rights and labor historians, though it had the most direct
impact on the landmark civil rights laws of the period. Like Randolph’s
previous groups, the NALC had both a strong local following and a
national influence, and in industrial urban centers its branches pushed
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for civil rights reform and greater democracy within the AFL-CIO. Fair
and full employment, open housing laws and ordinances, equal access
to public accommodations, equality in education, and voting rights
topped the organization’s concerns—although, as Jones describes,
black women activists had to publicly disrupt the NALC’s founding
convention in order to have their interests included and their leadership acknowledged. From this standpoint, the NALC inspired a new
generation of civil rights workers while continuing the work begun by
civil rights activists at the turn of the twentieth century. Similarly, the
NALC continued the battle within the house of labor. Randolph’s nemesis, AFL-CIO president George Meany, begrudgingly gave ground to
his long-time union brother. As Jones illustrates, Randolph successfully
positioned the NALC on a national stage in order to pressure Meany
and the AFL-CIO into support for civil rights. The critical moment
came in 1963 when the NALC spearheaded the March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom. Afterwards, Meany and the AFL-CIO gave their
formal support to President Kennedy’s civil rights bill. Thus, despite
tensions that arose among civil rights and labor activists within the
NALC, Randolph’s last civil rights organization was as successful as it
was short-lived.
The fissures in the civil rights movement that were already generally
evident in the early 1960s—and specifically inside organizations such as
the NALC—led to cracks and collapses in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Younger activists separated themselves from older ones, and while
some maintained their adherence to nonviolence, others adopted strategies of armed self-help. Some sought to keep ties with the labor movement, while many appealed to black nationalist sentiments of group
solidarity, independence, and sovereignty. As Jerald Podair writes, all of
these issues and more were at the center of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville
controversy. Randolph, for his part, had to choose between those in the
civil rights movement who were advocating local control and race-centered solutions to the educational and community crises in New York
City, and those who were committed to the teachers’ union. In backing
the latter, Randolph set himself apart and never regained the stature he
once held among black freedom activists. He was not able to make a big
tent of liberals and radicals on the Left to collectively solve the problems in New York City. His goal of an interracial, interdenominational,
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intergenerational, and cross-political movement was as unrealized
in the 1960s and 1970s as it had been in the 1930s and 1940s. Podair
concludes that Randolph’s vision of a combined civil rights and labor
rights movement no longer had much meaning in the final half of the
twentieth century. His opponents in this conflict, who under other
circumstances could have been his allies, favored black community
empowerment over interracialism. To state it simply, Podair maintains
that African American grassroots activists chose race over class, if by
“class” one means support for the teachers’ union. Yet, as Podair’s narrative indicates, given the predominantly white ethnic character of the
union, the teachers to a large extent chose “identity politics” as well.
Ultimately, the controversy—and Randolph’s role within it—powerfully
demonstrated the vexing situations that could occur when race and
class collided as well as intersected.
Taken together, these essays demonstrate that Randolph and the
organizations he developed and led remain consistent and compelling subjects of historical inquiry. From a historiographical standpoint,
discussing Randolph is relevant to several current scholarly conversations. Randolph’s life and work fit well within the debate about race
and class in the radical movements of the twentieth century. What was
Randolph’s view of the importance of class in American society? Did
those concerns outweigh considerations of race? What were the advantages and realities of Randolph’s efforts as he tried to deal with both
the marginalization of black workers because they were black, and the
exploitation of working-class laborers because they were at the bottom
of the political economy? Further, in the realm of labor and workingclass history, Randolph and the Pullman porters union stand as potent
emblems of independent black worker self-organization within the
house of labor. A counterhegemonic element within the AFL, the BSCP
was also a model of working-class agency and institution building in
the black communal spaces beyond the point of production. Here, the
union formed a vital touchstone for a national African American public sphere and the nucleus of a succession of black freedom organizations, including the National Negro Congress, the March on Washington Movement, and the Negro American Labor Council. At the same
time, with the BSCP leadership’s focus on male breadwinner wages, and
the eventual exclusion of maids from its membership, the union and
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A Reintroduction to Asa Philip Randolph >> 17
its president serve as a troubling example of the discrimination against
black working-class women on the basis of gender as well as race and
class. To our eyes, Randolph’s record was mixed, but he was clearly conscious of the gendered nature of his organizations and politics. Overall, this emergent scholarly emphasis on autonomous, internally contradictory forms of black working-class organization and mobilization
has been reflected in the diverse perspectives captured in this volume.
Collectively, they represent vital efforts to reconstruct, resituate, and
expand narratives of black working-class institution-building, community formation, and politics beyond the narrow lenses of both whitedominated trade unionism and middle-class–dominated black civil
rights activism.
We hope that this volume engages a wide variety of scholars, especially those outside history proper. In the interdisciplinary field of Black
Freedom Studies, a cohort of scholars including Timothy Tyson (1999),
Simon Hall (2005), Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (2003),
Robert Self (2003), and Thomas Sugrue (2008), has sought to dramatically rethink the composition of leaders and participants, periodization schema, and regional foci identified with African American social
movements in the twentieth century. Theorizing a “long” civil rights
movement encompassing working-class leadership as well as middle-class stewardship, female domestic workers as well as black male
clergy, the 1930s and 1970s as well as the 1950s and 1960s, grassroots
local movements in the Northeast, Midwest, and the Pacific West, as
well as in the South, and Cold War international as well as U.S. domestic landscapes, these historians and social scientists have challenged
definitions of civil rights struggles as being concerned only with public accommodations, de jure discrimination, and the vote below the
Mason-Dixon line during the decade between the Brown v. Board of
Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954 and the passage of the 1965
Voting Rights Act. In the process, they have sparked timely debates and
conflicting interpretations about the meanings, goals, and legacies of
“black freedom struggles”—a flexible term simultaneously enveloping
and surpassing a range of legislative reforms typically associated with
the “classical” 1954–1965 period of modern civil rights activism.
From a “long” perspective, the sheer length of Randolph’s public
career also makes him a handy symbol of a movement that spanned
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the length of the twentieth century. At the same time, scholars such as
Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang (2007) and Steven Lawson (2011)
have strongly cautioned against overstating the continuity of this timeline of struggle. For instance, like his opposition to Marcus Garvey in
the early twentieth century, Randolph’s opposition to the grassroots
black and Puerto Rican organizers in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville conflict during the late twentieth century complicates efforts to situate him
within an unbroken narrative of black nationalism simply because he
built all-black organizations throughout his career. From this perspective, the varying twists and turns in Randolph’s organizational activities
actually illustrate the disruptions, setbacks, and shifting political strategies, rhetorics, and paradigms that black activists experienced over
the course of that century. Similarly, Randolph embodies not only the
convergence of civil rights and labor activism, but also illustrates the
need to reconceptualize the two as fundamentally inseparable. As a figurehead of black labor politics, he demonstrates, further, the dominant
role of working-class constituents and interests in shaping far-reaching
black freedom struggles and agendas, including fair and full employment, an egalitarian labor movement, an extension of social wages,
and similar social democratic reforms centered on the combination
of racial justice and economic redistribution. Furthermore, and in a
manner that is consistent with scholars’ continuing emphasis on black
women’s activism, black women’s involvement in the BSCP, MOWM,
and the NALC suggest the centrality of their networks in constructing
and maintaining African American social movements. For black urban
and cultural historians, Randolph’s legacy is more ambiguous. In one
reading, the porters were tribunes of a maturing black working-class
politics; in another, they were the harbingers of black middle-class formation. Randolph himself seemed to desire both.
Randolph is perhaps most controversial in the outpouring of literature on the impact of anticommunism during the early Cold War
years. In one school of thought, historians argue that Randolph, a
Socialist who became embittered against the Communist Party during
the 1920s and 1930s, rightly acted against the machinations of Communist activists, especially in the National Negro Congress. In doing
so, he heroically protected the integrity of American trade unionism,
as well as the indigenous leadership and independence of black civil
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A Reintroduction to Asa Philip Randolph >> 19
rights organizations. Scholars in a competing intellectual camp contend that Randolph’s anticommunism contributed actively to the isolation of black antiracists associated with the Communist Left and to the
destruction of insurgent black labor radicals and coalitions whose militancy exceeded his own. From this standpoint, the story of the Negro
American Labor Council, for example, has to be framed partly within
the context of the earlier destruction of the National Negro Labor
Council (NNLC) and the labor movement’s general purge of suspected
“subversives” during the late 1940s and early to mid-1950s. In this vein,
Randolph was a villainous accomplice in demobilizing the trade union
movement as a socially transformative agent in the United States and in
retarding the emergence of post–World War II black mass direct action
against U.S. racial apartheid. As this line of argument goes, he became
a reactionary who, by the late 1960s, stood in opposition to strains of
working-class radicalism during the period of Black Power.
Finally, Randolph’s legacy speaks to contemporary times. The past
several decades have witnessed the contraction of organized labor,
the deterioration in the conditions of the black working class, and the
plummeting living standards of U.S. workers across the board. Similarly, an understated consequence of the recent domestic economic crisis has been its disproportionate effects on African Americans, as evident in the plummeting wealth and overall implosion of the post–civil
rights black middle class. Thus, the current moment is a strong and poignant rebuke to the politics Randolph espoused, and signals an erasure
of the reforms to which he devoted his life for nearly fifty years. At the
same time, recent events—most significantly the battles waged in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin by public- and private-sector employees
against union-busting austerity—have renewed the visibility of organized labor, brought greater immediacy to labor history, and reasserted
the salience of working-class political discourses. As historian Robert
O. Self and others have contended, black workers have been pivotal
in challenging social and economic inequalities and imagining more
democratic alternatives for the whole of society. Not surprisingly, the
decline of organized labor’s power and influence was closely tied to the
postwar retreat of a labor-liberal alliance from issues of racial justice. At
our own contemporary moment, when we are witnessing the possibility of a reenergized labor-centered popular politics, we have much to
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gain from a focus on the critical role that working-class people of color
have played in advancing the meanings of citizenship and democracy in
the United States and abroad. For the nation’s working-class majority,
therefore, Randolph remains an extremely timely example of the possibilities of an antiracist labor movement, a black politics informed by
working-class consciousness, and a larger advocacy for social democracy in U.S. civic culture.
Against this wide and textured backdrop, the contributors to Reframing Randolph have taken Randolph’s portrait down from the wall to
reexamine and resituate it, allowing scholars to regard him in new and
often competing, lights. These essays do not comprise a definitive portrait. Rather, they exemplify the nuances required to view Randolph in
the fullness of the history he lived, and the historiography that has followed in his wake.
Note
The editors thank Pam Lerow, of CLAS Digital Media Services at the University of Kansas, for creating the index for this volume. They are also grateful to their editor, Clara
Platter, and the staff at New York University Press, most especially Constance Grady
and Alexia Traganas. Finally, the editors thank Deborah Gershenowitz, who was instrumental in placing this project in the expert hands of NYU Press.
1. Timothy Noah, “A. Philip Randolph, Nomad,” New Republic, June 12, 2012, http://
www.tnr.com/blog/plank/104025/philip-randolph-nomad.
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