Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
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that took place among my mother, my aunts, and from time to time a woman neighbor or two, but I will never forget the context of those conversations when it came to the discussion of what was considered a good job for a Negro man. The comparison was often made to the deceased husband of Mrs. Bunn, who lived across the street from us. In the women’s words, “Mr. Bunn was a man who ran the railroad, made a good living, plus tips, was well spoken, dignified, wore a uniform to work, and took care of his family.” Of course, I would come to the knowledge, as I grew older, that Mrs. Bunn’s husband was a Pullman Porter. Although Randolph’s name was not mentioned, it was “his ideals of black working-class manhood” that formed the portrait of the black man who was well respected and revered in our home, our neighborhood, and our church. That was the image alive in the minds of Bible-rooted, hardworking domestics like my mother, who probably never saw themselves as union supporters. Yet their vision of a dignified Negro was A. Phillip Randolph’s unionized Pullman Porters.
In August 1963, I was a month away from my thirteenth birthday, but I felt like I was coming of age. What I had seen on television and read over the prior months had pained, scared, and hardened me. The images of African Americans having dogs and fire hoses turned on them, school doors being blocked in the name of “segregation now and segregation forever,” and the knowledge that an assassin’s bullet had killed a young civil rights leader in Mississippi—all had their impact, and I felt that a life with inequality was no real life at all.
I knew there were African Americans planning to go to Washington, D.C., to demand a change in our civil rights laws, and I thought the organizer and leader was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Just as I did not know, as a young girl, of the significant role that A. Phillip Randolph played in making the 1963 March on Washington a historic reality, many today—particularly the younger generation of African Americans—are unaware of this significant piece of history. Reframing Randolph gives us a deeper understanding of the role that Randolph played in planning the 1963 March on Washington and with groups like the Negro American Labor Council (NALC), which was founded in 1960 to challenge segregation inside and outside the labor movement. This book also calls on us to reassess the roles that Randolph and the NALC played in pressuring Congress for the passage of our nation’s civil rights legislation and the laws that resulted in President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.
Johnson’s antipoverty legislation gave me my first opportunity to enter the workforce as a teenager in an after-school and summer jobs program. Working in the Corp of Engineers Acquisition Branch, I made more than the minimum wage and more than my mother made as a domestic. This opportunity helped me embark upon my own journey as an African American woman down the road of labor and social justice activism as a union organizer, and ultimately as the first African American to serve as the Executive Vice President of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), a position that I held from 2007 to 2013. I never had the opportunity to meet A. Phillip Randolph, but the role he played in advocating for and advancing the righteous cause of social and economic justice and his unwavering commitment to speak truth to power both within and outside the labor movement made my walk down the social justice road a lot easier. Daily I am reminded that the struggle to hold on to the social justice gains made by Randolph and others is neverending.
The labor movement is more diverse now than in those days when Randolph sat as the lone African American voice around the AFL-CIO Executive Council, but conversations about workers’ rights, civil rights, and issues of race, class, and discrimination are still deeply important. Our more diverse and inclusive labor movement is also determined to do more than continue conversations around justice. At the most recent AFL-CIO convention, we stepped up our efforts to eliminate injustice within and outside our federation for the sake of our movement and the democracy we hold so dear. Just as Randolph fought to organize the Pullman Porters in the 1920s and 1930s, workers today of every ethnicity, every color, every sexual orientation and gender, and every education and skill level struggle to have a voice in the ongoing work for respect on the job and decent wages and benefits. Women today continue the fight for equal pay for equal work, and like the women who were denied a voice at the 1963 March on Washington, they continue the struggle against sexism within the organizations, unions, institutions, and movements in which we participate. Despite the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, today there are attempts across this country to suppress the votes of people of color and the poor. Fifty years since the 1963 March on Washington, Americans are still marching on the nation’s capital demanding “Jobs and Freedom.”
When I think about A. Phillip Randolph, I think of one of his famous observations:
At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything, and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.
After reading Reframing Randolph: A Reassessment of A. Phillip Randolph’s Legacies to Labor and the Black Freedom Movement, I have further confirmation that if there had not been a Randolph, black workers and the civil rights movement would not have traveled as far as we have down the bumpy roads of injustice toward our many destinations and toward justice and freedom for all.
Arlene Holt Baker
Executive Vice President Emerita
American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations
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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 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