Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
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Brazeal, Herbert Garfinkel, and others launched the first generation of scholarship on Randolph and the BSCP. The Black Worker established the initial conceptual and methodological model for research and writing on Randolph and the porters.2 Drawing heavily upon the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Messenger, as well as published agreements between Pullman and the BSCP, Spero and Harris developed a dialectical perspective on the racial paternalism of the Pullman Company; accented the limits of economic radicalism; and treated Randolph’s emphasis on publicity campaigns as a problem rather than a virtue in organizing the porters’ union.
Spero and Harris clearly delineated the dual nature of the relationship that prevailed between black workers and the Pullman Company. Formed in the early aftermath of emancipation in 1867, the Pullman Company offered black workers, mostly ex-slaves, one of their earliest alternatives to employment in the land, where a hostile southern elite was determined to reclaim full authority over the labor of black people. Almost from the outset, the porter’s job became “practically a Negro monopoly.” Despite the job’s connection to enslavement and “servility” in the minds of Pullman and the traveling white public, it provided higher wages and better working conditions than most work open to southern black men until the onset of World War I, the Great Migration, and the expansion of job opportunities in mass production firms.3
Spero and Harris also outlined a broad litany of African American complaints against the Pullman Company. The Black Worker underscored the porters’ painful and ongoing struggles with low wages, dependence on tips, long hours, and uncompensated work; performance of conductor’s work at porter’s pay; collateral occupational expenses that came out of their own pockets (uniforms, shoe polish, food, etc.); and lack of adequate time for rest or sleep during long runs. Even so, Spero and Harris concluded that such grievances were insufficient for most porters to join Randolph, build a strong union, and challenge Pullman to increase wages and improve working conditions and on-the-job treatment. “The porter’s contact with the well-to-do traveling public led him to absorb its point of view and to seek to emulate its standards. . . . It gave him a thrill to have bankers and captains of industry ride in his car. . . . It made him feel like a captain of industry himself, even if it did not make him affluent or ease the burden of his work. Even a vicarious captain of industry is rather poor trade-union material.” Moreover, in their view, Randolph’s economic radicalism blinded him to three interrelated facets of early twentieth- century black life that undercut his organizing effectiveness: “(1) the Negro’s orthodox religious traditions; (2) the growing prevalence of Negro middle-class ideology [as reflected in the politics of the black press, elected officials, and ministers of leading black churches]; and (3) racial antagonism between white and black workers.” Equally important, according to The Black Worker, Randolph overemphasized the utility of publicity and neglected long-range planning and the day-to-day work of the BSCP. “If it were his purpose to win recognition from the Pullman Company too much publicity was likely to strengthen the company’s determination not to yield, because yielding in the glare of publicity would be a double defeat.” Spero and Harris forcefully argued that a “less theatrical program” of labor organizing might not have “made the front pages” of the news, but would have “invited less company opposition and . . . less risk of ruin.” Randolph and the BSCP exhibited the capacity to “initiate movements but lacked the power of sustaining them. . . . This was their undoing.” Accordingly, The Black Worker portrayed Randolph as a leader largely out of touch with black workers. In their analysis of the BSCP’s aborted strike action of 1928, for example, Spero and Harris argued that Randolph moved ahead with the strike “without first finding out how the men really felt about a genuine strike.”4
Spero and Harris set the mold for subsequent studies on Randolph and the Brotherhood. From World War II to the postwar period, inquiries addressed the repulsive as well as the attractive features of African American employment for the Pullman Company; the limits of labor radicalism within the context of a white supremacist socioeconomic and political regime; and the challenges of BSCP media efforts to generate sympathy for the cause of black workers. Based on the changes wrought by the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar years, this research also challenged key interpretations of The Black Worker, advanced before the significant breakthroughs of the New Deal era. Economic historian Brailsford R. Brazeal analyzed with approval Randolph’s use of “propaganda” as a tried and tested technique in the larger organized American labor movement. Publicity and education (particularly the sponsorship of labor institutes and “Negro” labor conferences) generated endorsements from organized white labor (including the railroad brotherhoods and the American Federation of Labor) and gained increasing support from diverse African American community organizations and groups, including the black press, churches, fraternal orders, public office holders, civil rights and social service organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League. Moreover, in Brazeal’s hands, rather than neglecting the religious culture of black workers, Randolph’s upbringing in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Jacksonville, Florida, shaped his appeal to porters in religious terms. “To have the porters build a union as they had helped members of their racial group build powerful churches was the motive behind Randolph’s use of religious appeal and terminology,” Brazeal wrote. “‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free’ was the heading for most of the bulletins sent out by national headquarters of the Brotherhood and is now used on the cover page of the Brotherhood’s publication, The Black Worker.”5
Brazeal rejected Spero and Harris’s negative assessment of Randolph’s leadership and the BSCP’s potential to achieve its goals. Despite the dire straits confronting the Brotherhood as the Depression deepened, a decade later Brazeal described the BSCP as “an efficiently managed international labor union . . . proof that Negro workers under Negro leaders are capable of building a union that reflects a genius in organization and leadership. . . . Brotherhood leaders are not motivated by a vague theoretical appreciation of collective bargaining techniques because everyday they deal with problems that deepen their insight as labor leaders.” Perhaps most importantly, the Brotherhood led a large number of black workers into the American Federation of Labor (AFL) at a time when the AFL and the Big Four Brotherhoods (i.e., the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Brakemen, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, and the Order of Railway Conductors) maintained strict racist attitudes and practices toward black workers. The BSCP served as “an entering wedge, which has been effectively used to challenge the prejudices and inhibitions of several internationals in their reactions to Negro workers. Aside from competitive factors which would drive the Federation to seek Negro members, the constant hammering away by the Brotherhood at its shortcomings has been a decided force in increasing its disposition to extend more considerations to Negro workers.”6
Drawing more inspiration from Brazeal than from Spero and Harris, When Negroes March by historian Herbert Garfinkel carried the story of Randolph and the BSCP forward into the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) and the politics of the federal Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), Garfinkel reinforced Brazeal’s principal arguments regarding the efficacy of Randolph’s leadership. Citing Spero and Harris’s The Black Worker, Garfinkel underscored and challenged the widespread and continuing proposition that Randolph was “incapable of running an efficient organization by those who viewed organizational talents strictly in administrative” terms. Behind the “erroneous claim that Randolph had no program,” Ginfinkel argued, “was conservative, middle-class dislike for Randolph as a radical mass leader.” He treated the March on Washington Movement as an effective mass-based labor and civil rights initiative, and accented Randolph’s rising prominence as a civil rights figure alongside leaders in the NAACP, the Urban League, and ministers of the most influential African American churches, including Martin Luther King, Jr. Moreover, by extending analysis of Randolph’s leadership forward into the postwar years, When Negroes March documented the transition of the MOWM from a grassroots movement into a formal civil rights organization. Although the institutionalization of the MOWM represented a decline in its grassroots appeal, within the hostile climate of the Cold War years Garfinkel convincingly argued that its earlier wartime militancy, energy, and program of action inspired the rapidly