Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
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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 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 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 labor-oriented 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, 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.
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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, 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, working-class culture, radical