Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
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of Illinois Press of folklorist Jack Santino’s Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters. Whereas much of Randolph and BSCP scholarship focused on leaders and leadership issues, Santino’s book brought the lives of porters themselves into clearer view. Based upon multiple interviews with nearly thirty Pullman porters as well as Rosina Corrothers Tucker, a past president of the Ladies Auxiliary of the BSCP, Miles of Smiles offers unique insights into virtually every facet of the porter’s life and labor from the inside out. The volume also includes photographs from the porters’ family collections. These self-images contrast sharply with the “media images” released to the public by the Pullman Company. As Santino described his effort, “This book contains the porters’ own understanding of their past and their occupational lives. As such it presents a kind of folk history. . . . The data enrich the scholarship discourse on Pullman porters by adding the porters’ own descriptions of their culture to the data historians have provided.”16
Working with an expanding variety of sources as well as new conceptual approaches, recent scholarship advances our understanding of Randolph and the BSCP along several closely interrelated lines. Studies by Beth T. Bates, Cornelius L. Bynum, Melinda Chauteauvert, Paula Pfeffer, and Cynthia Taylor, to name a few, provide fresh insights into Randolph’s “charismatic” leadership, political ideology, and religiosity; inter- and intra-racial alliance-building activities; and the impact of gender conventions and social practices on the work of the BSCP.17 In seeking to understand the origins of Randolph’s political beliefs, scholars have grappled with the intersection of ideas developed in the Jim Crow urban South with the emerging radical political, social, and cultural milieu of New York City. Many have probed the influence of Harlem as an emerging global black community, of studies at City College of New York, and of membership in the Socialist Party on Randolph’s thinking and social activism. Contemporary research also takes issue with a large body of scholarship that underscores Randolph’s a-religiosity or “atheism,” stretching from Spero and Harris’s The Black Worker through World War II and beyond. Most prevailing accounts of Randolph’s leadership ideology cast him as a “doubter” or as areligious. Randolph’s own rhetoric during the most radical phase of his career as a labor and civil rights leader reinforced this view. Moreover, as coeditor of the Messenger during World War I and the 1920s, Randolph adopted an outlook that seemed to question the value of organized religion. The Messenger opposed “all creeds of church and social orders” that hampered the fight for social justice. “Freedom is my Bride, Liberty my Angel of Light, Justice my God.”18
In her model study of Randolph’s religious ideas and commitments, however, historian Cynthia Taylor shows how Randolph’s leadership ideology and career as a labor radical and civil rights activist were deeply rooted in his African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church background. Taylor locates Randolph’s religious sensibilities in the household of his AME parents (his father was a minister) and their ongoing engagement with the day-to-day life of their community. Theirs was a religion that preached self-defense as well as salvation. On one occasion, Randolph witnessed how his mother and father determined to use armed force if necessary to thwart the lynching of a black man accused of sexually molesting a white woman. Taylor persuasively argues that Randolph imbibed the elements of a religious culture that took the form of a “social gospel,” eschewing the tradition of “getting religion” for the hereafter in favor of an activist faith aimed at changing conditions in this world. Upon arriving in Harlem, Randolph blended the ideas of the Socialist Party with his own convictions growing out of his southern cultural, social, economic, and political experiences. Over the course of his long career, Randolph’s religious sensibilities and commitments continued to inform and fuel his political activism. Randolph helped to build a solid base of support for black porters among the black clergy during the 1930s; initiated “prayer protests” as part of the March on Washington Movement for defense industry jobs during World War II; and linked the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to the prayer pilgrimages of the 1950s. Following the exceedingly successful prayer pilgrimage of 1957, Randolph formally rejoined the AME church. At the same time, Taylor concludes, the African American church of the 1950s also recovered its “militant social conscience,” and rejoined Randolph.19
Cornelius Bynum reinforced the basic thrust of Taylor’s treatment of Randolph’s religiosity and politics. Through the lens of what he calls “an analytical intellectual history that uses biography to illuminate the origins and evolution of central aspects of Randolph’s thought and activism,” Bynum acknowledges the various ways that life in New York City helped to crystallize Randolph’s thinking and social activism, but he concludes that Randolph’s family, the AME church, the urban South, and Jim Crow established the fundamental groundwork for the later development of Randolph’s radical class and racial analyses of the black condition. Nonetheless, somewhat more so than Taylor, Bynum underscores greater discontinuity and shifts over time, including Randolph’s emphasis on the primacy of class during World War I and early postwar years, and transition to a more flexible analysis of the dynamics of class and race by the mid-1920s and thereafter.20
In addition to revamping our understanding of religion in the development of Randolph’s political ideology, recent studies also underscore the pivotal role of inter- and intra-racial alliance building activities in the success of BSCP campaigns. In her biographical account of Randolph, historian Paula Pfeffer employs the notion of “situational charisma,” and, focusing mainly on the years after World War II, Pfeffer argued, contrary to Harris, that charisma (reinforced by the assistance of associates) helps to explain how Randolph rose to a place of extraordinary influence within the African American community. She adds further that only his capacity to build effective political alliances (through nonviolent direct action strategies) fully explains Randolph’s leadership and the increasing influence of the BSCP. During World War II, the March on Washington Movement—a cross-class African American movement—legitimized the “ideology of civil disobedience” among young African Americans. Although Randolph and the BSCP continued to forge links across class lines within the African American community, for him, interracial alliances with varieties of sympathetic white organizations and constituencies gained increasing sway in the years after World War II. In substantial detail, Pfeffer shows how these alliances developed through such diverse organizations as the National Council for a Permanent FEPC, the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, the Emergency Committee Against Military Jim Crow, and especially the prayer pilgrimages and youth marches on Washington, D.C., to speed up the desegregation of schools during the 1950s. Together, these efforts fueled the emergence and spread of the modern social justice movement that eventually helped to shatter the larger Jim Crow edifice.21
Whereas Pfeffer emphasizes the emergence of powerful interracial alliances in the post–World War II years, historian Beth Bates analyzes the process by which Randolph and the BSCP built networks of support within the black community and helped to transform an often anti-union constituency into an indispensable ally. Basing her research on the BSCP campaign to organize Pullman porters in Chicago, the company’s backyard, Bates convincingly argues that previous studies of the BSCP failed to systematically analyze the relationship between the BSCP and the larger black community. In careful detail, she shows how Randolph and the BSCP gradually built “protest networks” from the ground up. Through the work of black clubwomen (particularly the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Club), the union’s Citizens Committee for the Brotherhood, and a series of labor conferences following the aborted strike of 1928, the intra-racial alliance building activities of the BSCP gradually gained widespread community-based support. This support included the influential Chicago Defender as well as a wide range of religious, civic, and social service organizations (including local branches of the National Urban League and NAACP), as reflected in the rise of the National Negro Congress (NNC) and later the MOWM, although Randolph soon resigned as president of the NNC following disputes over the role of the Communist Party in the organization. Bates convincingly argues that community networks represented “the connective tissue between the porters’ union and the politics of the black community.”22
Another theme in recent historiography is a recurring effort to pinpoint the role of Randolph and the BSCP in the transition of African American politics from an earlier largely dependent “clientage politics” to a new