Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
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century, Randolph’s opposition to the grassroots black and Puerto Rican organizers in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville conflict during the late twentieth century complicates efforts to situate him within an unbroken narrative of black nationalism simply because he built all-black organizations throughout his career. From this perspective, the varying twists and turns in Randolph’s organizational activities actually illustrate the disruptions, setbacks, and shifting political strategies, rhetorics, and paradigms that black activists experienced over the course of that century. Similarly, Randolph embodies not only the convergence of civil rights and labor activism, but also illustrates the need to reconceptualize the two as fundamentally inseparable. As a figurehead of black labor politics, he demonstrates, further, the dominant role of working-class constituents and interests in shaping far-reaching black freedom struggles and agendas, including fair and full employment, an egalitarian labor movement, an extension of social wages, and similar social democratic reforms centered on the combination of racial justice and economic redistribution. Furthermore, and in a manner that is consistent with scholars’ continuing emphasis on black women’s activism, black women’s involvement in the BSCP, MOWM, and the NALC suggest the centrality of their networks in constructing and maintaining African American social movements. For black urban and cultural historians, Randolph’s legacy is more ambiguous. In one reading, the porters were tribunes of a maturing black working-class politics; in another, they were the harbingers of black middle-class formation. Randolph himself seemed to desire both.
Randolph is perhaps most controversial in the outpouring of literature on the impact of anticommunism during the early Cold War years. In one school of thought, historians argue that Randolph, a Socialist who became embittered against the Communist Party during the 1920s and 1930s, rightly acted against the machinations of Communist activists, especially in the National Negro Congress. In doing so, he heroically protected the integrity of American trade unionism, as well as the indigenous leadership and independence of black civil rights organizations. Scholars in a competing intellectual camp contend that Randolph’s anticommunism contributed actively to the isolation of black antiracists associated with the Communist Left and to the destruction of insurgent black labor radicals and coalitions whose militancy exceeded his own. From this standpoint, the story of the Negro American Labor Council, for example, has to be framed partly within the context of the earlier destruction of the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC) and the labor movement’s general purge of suspected “subversives” during the late 1940s and early to mid-1950s. In this vein, Randolph was a villainous accomplice in demobilizing the trade union movement as a socially transformative agent in the United States and in retarding the emergence of post–World War II black mass direct action against U.S. racial apartheid. As this line of argument goes, he became a reactionary who, by the late 1960s, stood in opposition to strains of working-class radicalism during the period of Black Power.
Finally, Randolph’s legacy speaks to contemporary times. The past several decades have witnessed the contraction of organized labor, the deterioration in the conditions of the black working class, and the plummeting living standards of U.S. workers across the board. Similarly, an understated consequence of the recent domestic economic crisis has been its disproportionate effects on African Americans, as evident in the plummeting wealth and overall implosion of the post–civil rights black middle class. Thus, the current moment is a strong and poignant rebuke to the politics Randolph espoused, and signals an erasure of the reforms to which he devoted his life for nearly fifty years. At the same time, recent events—most significantly the battles waged in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin by public- and private-sector employees against union-busting austerity—have renewed the visibility of organized labor, brought greater immediacy to labor history, and reasserted the salience of working-class political discourses. As historian Robert O. Self and others have contended, black workers have been pivotal in challenging social and economic inequalities and imagining more democratic alternatives for the whole of society. Not surprisingly, the decline of organized labor’s power and influence was closely tied to the postwar retreat of a labor-liberal alliance from issues of racial justice. At our own contemporary moment, when we are witnessing the possibility of a reenergized labor-centered popular politics, we have much to gain from a focus on the critical role that working-class people of color have played in advancing the meanings of citizenship and democracy in the United States and abroad. For the nation’s working-class majority, therefore, Randolph remains an extremely timely example of the possibilities of an antiracist labor movement, a black politics informed by working-class consciousness, and a larger advocacy for social democracy in U.S. civic culture.
Against this wide and textured backdrop, the contributors to Reframing Randolph have taken Randolph’s portrait down from the wall to reexamine and resituate it, allowing scholars to regard him in new and often competing, lights. These essays do not comprise a definitive portrait. Rather, they exemplify the nuances required to view Randolph in the fullness of the history he lived, and the historiography that has followed in his wake.
NOTE
The editors thank Pam Lerow, of CLAS Digital Media Services at the University of Kansas, for creating the index for this volume. They are also grateful to their editor, Clara Platter, and the staff at New York University Press, most especially Constance Grady and Alexia Traganas. Finally, the editors thank Deborah Gershenowitz, who was instrumental in placing this project in the expert hands of NYU Press.
1. Timothy Noah, “A. Philip Randolph, Nomad,” New Republic, June 12, 2012, http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/104025/philip-randolph-nomad.
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Researching Randolph
Shifting Historiographic Perspectives
JOE WILLIAM TROTTER, JR.
Formed in 1925, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) emerged as the most prominent symbol of the organized black labor movement during the twentieth century. Under the leadership of the civil rights, social justice, and labor activist Asa Philip Randolph, the BSCP organized black porters and maids at the Chicago-based Pullman Company, the largest single employer of blacks in the nation. Adopting the motto “Service not Servitude,” the organization not only pushed for wage increases and better working conditions and treatment for black porters, but also linked the porters’ struggle to the predominantly white labor movement and to the larger struggle of the African American community to demolish the segregationist order. In so doing, Randolph and the BSCP helped to transform the American labor movement and set the stage for the abolition of the Jim Crow system.
Beginning during World War II, Randolph’s militant March on Washington Movement to desegregate defense industry jobs and the U.S. armed forces culminated in the historic gathering of some 250,000 people on the mall of the nation’s capital in 1963. While a new leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., took center stage on that August day over fifty years ago, he and the entire modern black freedom movement stood squarely on the shoulders of Randolph and the BSCP. Because of Randolph’s stature and influence within both the labor and the civil rights movements, it is easy to regard the history of his struggles to advance the interests of black people without any dissent or disapproval. Yet despite his accomplishments and widely acknowledged charisma, Randolph was nonetheless what some scholars have described as “a polarizing figure” within twentieth century U. S. social movements. In their book The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (1931), economists Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris offered one of the earliest scholarly critiques of Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Spero and Harris sharply rebuked Randolph for what they saw as insensitivities and blind spots regarding the religious culture and community life of black workers, the magnitude of white workers’ racial hostility toward their African American counterparts, and the efficacy of publicity over day-to-day organizing in advancing the cause of Pullman porters.1 Reviewing the development of scholarship since Spero and Harris’s early and influential assessment, this essay explores shifting theoretical and methodological perspectives, sources, and arguments about Randolph and the BSCP over time, with an emphasis on the impact of Randolph’s leadership and political philosophy on the BSCP, the American labor movement, the African American community, and the larger fight