Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
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he succinctly states, his book “deploys diaspora as an analytic to rescue radical black internationalism from the narrative sutures of international communism.”
In his innovative transnational study of twentieth-century liberation movements in India and the United States, historian Nico Slate advances the goal of a new historiography of black internationalism. Employing the notion of “colored cosmopolitanism,” Slate reinforces the tie between Randolph’s religious sensibilities and his radical politics. Randolph not only “framed the lessons of Gandhi as Christian in spirit and American in practice,” but also “imagined a mass-based Gandhi satyagraha grounded in colored cosmopolitanism and led by an all-Black organization in partnership with white liberals and Gandhian activists.” Slate shows how, following Gandhi’s initiation of the “Quit India movement” in the late summer of 1942, Randolph and the MOWM looked increasingly toward the Indian independence movement for inspiration, and in the process highlights the ways that “transnational linkages could reinforce a Black militancy that exceeded the American nation while making claims upon it.”28
Although recent studies establish firm connections among the porters, Randolph, the BSCP, and the successes of the modern twentieth-century black freedom movement, they also suggest that this trajectory was by no means inevitable. Ongoing class, racial, nationalist, and internationalist struggles both complicated and enhanced the political career of A. Philip Randolph and the labor battles of the BSCP. World War I and the 1920s opened radical new possibilities for the African American struggle for freedom and economic emancipation. The labor demands of the American war effort brought rising numbers of southern and Caribbean blacks to American cities, particularly New York and Chicago. Some of these African Americans joined the Socialist Party and championed the cause of poor and working-class people across the color line. They called for a new interracial labor movement and worked to build better bridges between black and white workers.
Randolph, Chandler Owen, Hubert Harrison, Cyril Briggs, and others who joined the Harlem unit of the Socialist Party advanced a radical class analysis of the “race problem” during the war years, but they soon decried the party’s efforts to reduce all facets of the “race problem” to issues of class inequities. In 1917, in order to give voice to their concerns, West Indian–born Cyril Briggs and a cadre of other African Americans broke from the Socialist Party and formed the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB).29 In the columns of the Crusader, the official organ of the ABB, Briggs called for a concerted struggle against colonialism abroad and racism at home. In this way, the ABB anticipated the later “Double-V” campaign of World War II. Like Briggs, the West Indian socialist Hubert Harrison also abandoned the Socialist Party and spearheaded the formation of a new organization, the Liberty League, and its publication, the Voice, to address the neglect of race issues by members of the radical Left. Harrison’s break with the Socialist Party became even more pronounced when he became a contributing editor to Marcus Garvey’s widely disseminated Negro World newspaper. Following his break with the Socialists, Harrison declared, the “roots of class-consciousness . . . inhere in a temporary economic order; whereas the roots of race-consciousness must of necessity survive any and all changes in the economic order.”30
In 1925, when Randolph helped to launch the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids and promoted trade unionism as the principal vehicle for the economic emancipation of black workers, the path ahead remained open and full of alternative possibilities. While Randolph had vehemently eschewed Garvey and the UNIA’s brand of black nationalism in favor of labor solidarity, as head of the Brotherhood he increasingly supported a notion of race pride and racial unity that echoed Garvey’s ideas about race pride, beauty, and the intelligence of black people.31 Following Randolph’s break with the NNC over the issue of Communist Party influence in the organization, his anti-Communist stance became legendary. In early 1941, despite Communist Party attempts to stymie the effort, the March on Washington Movement, under the leadership of Randolph and the BSCP, resulted in the creation of the FEPC and growing efforts to desegregate the nation’s defense program.
In the aftermath of World War II, African Americans confronted the limits of struggle using established fair employment commissions. They renewed their efforts to build independent all-black labor unions like the National Negro Labor Council and intensified demonstrations against employment discrimination. Because of the NNLC’s close association with the American Communist Party, however, it became the focus of a vigorous wave of Cold War–inspired attacks from Randolph, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Assailed as a tool of the Soviet Union, the NNLC declined after about 1956. In the meantime, as historian Will Jones notes in his award-winning essay on the MOWM, while early postwar black trade unionists “failed to sustain links between civil rights and labor activism at the national level,” local efforts in such diverse cities as Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and Detroit resulted in the forging of “a powerful coalition of civil rights and labor activists,” as well as inspiring the formation of the Negro American Labor Council in 1959. The NALC strengthened links between African American labor struggles and the expanding nonviolent direct action movement for change in all aspects of African American life. Following his election as president, Randolph underscored his renewed commitment to militant labor and civil rights activism: “We reject ‘tokenism,’ that thin veneer of acceptance masquerading as democracy. . . . [that] history has placed upon the negro . . . and [believe that] the Negro alone [has] the basic responsibility to complete the uncompleted civil war revolution through keeping the fires of freedom burning in the civil rights movement.”32
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Published between 1931 and 1959, the first generation of scholarship on Randolph relied almost exclusively on the Messenger magazine, the African American press, and written contracts between the porters and the Pullman Company. While there were significant differences in focus and interpretation among the first wave of researchers, including Spero and Harris, Brazeal, Garfinkel, and others, these scholars emphasized the centrality of Randolph’s role (for better or for worse) in organizing the Pullman porters under extraordinary economic, social, cultural, and political constraints. Barriers to organizing black porters not only included a repressive corporate structure, a hostile white labor movement, and racially biased governmental policies, but also influential elite-dominated black community institutions that distrusted unions and urged porters to avoid antagonizing their employer.
Under the growing impact of the modern black freedom movement during the 1960s and 1970s, a second group of Randolph studies surveyed a broader range of sources and deepened our understanding of the organizing efforts of Randolph, the porters, and their union. New sources included extensive oral interviews with surviving porters and voluminous manuscript collections of relevant public agencies like the U.S. Mediation Board as well as the private papers of the BSCP, the NAACP, and the National Urban League. Based upon this enlarged body of evidence, studies by Jervis Anderson, Theodore Kornwiebel, William H. Harris, and others broadened the cast of characters to include Milton P. Webster and other BSCP organizers and deepened our understanding of Randolph’s early years as coeditor (with Chandler Owen) of the radical Messenger magazine.
Over the past two decades, a new wave of research and writing built upon an even broader range of primary source materials has dramatically transformed interpretations of Randolph’s historical place and significance. Available records now include the collected papers of Randolph himself; a fuller set of Pullman Company records at the Newberry Library in Chicago; and, perhaps most important, a large and impressive roster of oral interviews with grassroots, rank-and-file porters and maids as well as previously little known female leadership figures like Rosina Carrothers Tucker, a porter widow and former president of the Ladies Auxiliary of the BSCP. Recent scholarship not only examines Randolph’s abiding commitment to economic justice for black workers and full citizenship for black people, but also explores his notion of “manhood” and “manhood” rights and questions of gender equity for black men and women. Moreover, in addition to revisiting and reinterpreting Randolph’s religiosity and the role of African American religious culture in shaping his political ideology, contemporary scholarship also underscores Randolph’s and the BSCP’s global connections and influences, including particularly the impact of Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha and of the Indian independence