Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
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of social struggle that incorporated notions of “interest group politics and mass action” in the larger civil rights and political struggles of black people in mid-twentieth-century America. In Bynum’s view, these ideas built directly on Randolph’s foundational notions “that genuine social justice required fair access to civil and economic rights and that race and class posed unique challenges for black workers.” In a similar vein, Pfeffer maintains that Randolph’s and the BSCP’s commitment to “nonviolent, direct mass action” facilitated the transition from an older, weaker politics dependent on unreliable white allies to aggressive public demands for equal rights, backed by the power of organizations allied with the BSCP. In her conceptualization of networks of support and alliance-building activities within the black community, Bates emphasizes the role of such networks in the transformation of black political behavior and strategies from what she calls a “politics of civility” or “Old Crowd” politics (a term coined by Randolph and the Messenger), to “New Crowd” politics, characterized by vociferous demands for equal rights from a position of organized strength rather than a position of weakness.23
Although historians and other scholars have not returned to Spero and Harris’s specific critical stance, a renewed critique of Randolph has emerged nonetheless. There were boundaries to Randolph’s conception of equal rights. For example, contemporary scholarship gives substantial attention to notions of manhood, femininity, and gender inequality. In his analysis, Bynum focuses on Randolph’s notion of masculinity or manhood as a critical factor leading him to a vigorous analysis of social justice for African Americans in general and black workers in particular. According to Bynum, notions of manhood articulated by the white socialist Eugene Debs and the black intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, particularly in his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), helped to bridge Randolph’s ideological transition to socialism. Initially, Randolph stood closely with Debs’s formulation of class over race, but over time gravitated toward Du Bois’s race-conscious notion of manhood. Similarly, Beth Bates shows how Randolph and the Brotherhood challenged Pullman’s paternalistic racism through the idiom of manhood rights in the years leading to the company’s recognition of the BSCP as the bargaining agent. Such notions, which were inspired by early Emancipation-era struggles for full citizenship rights, included women as well as men. Although black women faced the brunt of racial and class inequality, they not only joined the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Club in support of the BSCP, but also supported the BSCP’s women’s auxiliary, the Chicago Colored Women’s Economic Council, as wives and other female relatives of porters. Twentieth-century studies of African American women’s history, most notably Deborah Gray White’s Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves (1999), examine the connection between the women of the BSCP and established middle-class African American women’s organizations. Having pursued extensive primary research on the subject, White shows how the porters’ Ladies Auxiliary pressed its members’ middle-class counterparts into greater action on behalf of the black working class. Following a meeting with the National Council of Negro Women, Auxiliary president Helena Wilson wrote to the secretary treasurer of the BSCP unit: “I attended a session of the Council’s Convention . . . and I was not very satisfied with the discussions given to the lower income working groups.” When women answered the call for help from Randolph and the BSCP, they embraced the ideas of manhood and manhood rights as part of the larger ongoing struggle for full human rights.
Yet women’s indispensable support of the BSCP did little to lessen the gender barrier within the union or the workplace. Melinda Chateauvert’s Marching Together offers the most detailed critique of women and gender issues in the BSCP. Chateauvert documents the constraints that gender as well as class and racial conventions and social practices imposed on black women within the union as well as the union’s women’s auxiliary. Although women provided indispensable support to the union, they nonetheless confronted a series of limitations and slights. As Cheateauvert notes, “The Ladies’ Auxiliary was the distaff side of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. . . . Randolph’s propaganda stressed black manhood rights, calling for better working conditions, a family wage, respect from fellow workers, and equal citizenship. But for men to achieve manhood, women must be feminine; Brotherhood rhetoric depicted women as admiring wives, rarely noting their pivotal role in the twelve-year struggle for unionization.”24
In addition to the Ladies’ Auxiliary, some two hundred black women also worked as maids, car cleaners, and “porterettes” for the Pullman Company. Maids belonged to the union, paid dues, and suffered reprisals (including firings) for their union membership and activities. Still, not only did male members of the Brotherhood make it difficult for maids to adopt the notion of “manhood rights” on their own behalf as workers, but female members of the Auxiliary also refused to endorse female Pullman employees as members of the union with workplace and other grievances alongside those of men. Invariably, Auxiliary activities focused on ways to buttress the cause of male porters by increasing the efficiency of their wives and other female relatives as homemakers. Pullman maids found few sympathetic forums for voicing their particular complaints against the company. In 1929, when the AFL grudgingly granted the Brotherhood a federal charter, the union dropped “and Maids” from its earlier name: the “Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids.”
Following union victory against the Pullman Company in 1936, Randolph and the BSCP moved from the rhetoric of “manhood” and manhood rights to a notion of “black worker,” which assumed a masculine identity and further displaced attention from the special difficulties and issues facing female Pullman employees. Most damaging, in 1937, when the company signed its first contract with the BSCP, the agreement excluded maids from its provisions and protections, including seniority rights. Even so, the women of the Auxiliary sometimes referred to themselves as “members of the first international labor organization of Negro women in the world.” Against these and many other odds, Chateauvert makes clear, Pullman women helped to propel the MOWM of the 1940s and 1960s as well as the prayer pilgrimages and youth marches on Washington in 1957, 1958, and 1959 that led to the signal moment of King, Randolph, and other luminaries on the Washington mall in 1963.25
Historical case studies focusing directly on Randolph and the BSCP by no means represent the full range of research on the subject. More recently, specialized research on African American urban history, the history of black nationalism, and the history of black radicalism and internationalism expands the scope of Randolph and BSCP scholarship. Studies by Clarence Lang, Martha Biondi, and other twentieth-century African American urban historians include substantial analyses of Randolph and the Brotherhood. In his groundbreaking study of St. Louis, Lang examines the grassroots organizing activities of porters with abiding sensitivity to questions of gender and gender inequities as well as class divisions. “The porters’ casual practice of neglecting women members in union affairs and agendas was reified in policy, buttressing the idea that women’s ideal role was as porters’ wives, or members of BSCP auxiliaries. This was an insult added to injury particularly because black women had been central to sustaining the union since its inception.” In her book on post–World War II New York City, Martha Biondi offers a telling assessment of the strains and conflicts between Randolph and the labor movement beyond the BSCP, namely the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC). Formed in 1950–1951, the NNLC, Biondi persuasively argues, bridged “Black-labor left formations of the 1940s and those of the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond, such as the Negro American Labor Council and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.” Others have examined Randolph’s legacy in social politics. In this area, for example, historian Andrew Kersten explores the question of FEPC politics at the regional level through the lens of local community-based politics. As he puts it, “The experiences of the FEPC in the Midwest highlight the interconnections between the federal government, national associations, and community organizations.”26
Other scholars have focused critical attention on the complicated relationships involving Randolph, the BSCP, and black nationalists and radicals. In addition to Randolph’s relationship with Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA),27 a significant body of scholarship, including biographical studies of W. E. B. Du Bois and Hubert Harrison, probe Randolph’s relationship with other black activists, including members of the Communist Party. Historian Minkah Makalani opens a new window on the history of black radicalism by challenging earlier