Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
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desegregation demonstrations in the nation’s capital known as the “Prayer Pilgrimages for Freedom,” which laid the groundwork for the massive 1963 March on Washington.7
As the modern black freedom movement gained momentum during the 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation of Randolph and BSCP scholarship also gradually emerged. These studies took advantage of an increasing array of manuscript collections at the Library of Congress as well as state and local repositories, particularly the papers of the Chicago division of the BSCP housed at the Chicago Historical Society.8 In 1972, based upon a broad range of secondary and primary sources, including extensive interviews with Randolph, historical journalist Jervis Anderson published a political biography. Although Anderson largely confirmed Garfinkel’s wartime and postwar portrait of Randolph, he broadened his analysis beyond the connection between the MOWM of the 1940s and the prayer pilgrimages of the 1950s. Alongside diverse civil rights movement activities, Anderson recognized the persistence of Randolph’s role as the “black thorn” in the side of organized white labor. He showed Randolph and the BSCP pushing from within the AFL, and later from within the merged AFL-CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), to terminate racial discrimination against black workers. Beginning during the 1930s and continuing through the 1950s and 1960s, their efforts included the acrimonious confrontation with AFL-CIO president George Meany in 1959 and the launching of the Negro American Labor Council (NALC) in the same year. The NALC aimed “to fight and work for the implementation and strengthening of civil rights in the AFL-CIO and all other bona fide unions.”9 In short, Anderson promoted the expanding national, labor-centered, civil rights leadership stature of Randolph as the modern black freedom movement intensified. Similarly, in his narrative political biography of Randolph, also published in 1972 and based partly on his close association and friendship with Randolph, Daniel Davis dubbed Randolph “Mr. Labor . . . Father of the Civil Rights Movement.”10
Whereas Anderson reinforced the long-run trajectory of Randolph from labor activist and BSCP spokesman to modern civil rights leader, Theodore Kornwiebel’s No Crystal Stair revisited Randolph’s early Messenger years and applauded him as an activist political journalist. Specifically, Kornwiebel lauded the Messenger (coedited with Chandler Owen) for providing an alternative radical interpretation of African American life at a time when even the most progressive organs of the black press failed to fully articulate the deep-seated and bitter resentments of poor and working-class blacks. The persistence of class and racial inequality through the early years of the Great Migration angered growing numbers of young black urbanites. As African Americans’ dissatisfaction with their condition escalated, as did their political militancy, the Messenger gave a radical voice to virtually every major event impinging on the lives of blacks during World War I and the 1920s. Over an eleven-year period, the periodical exposed and debated such topics as government repression of black radicals; cultural pluralism and black nationalism; Africa and internationalism; unemployment and labor unions; electoral politics; and civil rights and race leadership.11
Based upon the Messenger’s extraordinary record of radical black journalism, No Crystal Stair emphasized how Randolph and the BSCP leadership understood the limits of interracial political alliances and the pivotal importance of economics in the struggle for political rights. Large and small business leaders, the press, philanthropic organizations, political leaders, and the government had proved themselves unreliable allies in the struggle for social justice and economic democracy for poor and working-class blacks. In order to wage a successful fight for full human and civil rights, African Americans had to secure first and foremost a solid economic foundation—specifically, jobs at decent pay as well as safe and healthy working conditions. According to Kornwiebel—and contrary to Spero and Harris—as early as 1923 Randolph and Owen had realized the obstacles of race as well as class and had “attempted to change tack,” with new efforts including providing support for some Harlem Renaissance artists and community-based entrepreneurs. In short, Randolph tried to make “racial journalism and practical economic reform compatible and possible” before taking the helm of the BSCP.12
Like Kornwiebel, who expanded our understanding of the Messenger years of Randolph, labor historian William H. Harris focused on Randolph’s formative early years (1925–1937) and the question of charismatic leadership. Unlike earlier studies of Randolph and the BSCP, Keeping the Faith brought into sharper focus a coterie of BSCP leaders (particularly Milton P. Webster, C. L. Dellums, and Ashley L. Totten) who carried out the grassroots work of organizing the porters while Randolph spearheaded the union’s public initiatives. Randolph effectively employed the tool of “propaganda” to transform “the weak Brotherhood into a major movement for [the] advancement of black people,” but his charismatic leadership had limits. His success depended on the work of his associates who had remained in the shadow of Randolph at the time as well as in later historical scholarship. In Harris’s view, Webster was the principal labor leader and union organizer, while Randolph emerged as “a national black leader” with an eye on using the BSCP as a vehicle for transforming the African American community, the American labor movement, and ultimately American urban industrial society into a more just and humane place to live and work.13
Harris focuses on the BSCP and its leaders rather than on the Pullman porters themselves, and he emphasizes the depth of rank-and-file support for Randolph and the union. In his analysis, Randolph was by no means out of touch with grassroots-level black porters and their needs. As Harris forcefully argues—even overstating his case—when the rank and file spoke through their vote to accept the BSCP as their bargaining agent, they did so because of “their faith not in the organization but in Randolph, who stood before them as a symbol of perseverance and courage.” In 1928, according to Harris, large numbers of porters had pledged to support the strike and were poised to walk out. On this point, according to Keeping the Faith, the earlier pioneering work by Spero and Harris offers “no evidence” to support its proposition that black porters would not have honored their pledge to strike. Furthermore, given the conditions of peak summer travel at the time and the impending election-year national conventions of the two major political parties, Harris maintains that such a strike might very well have succeeded if Randolph had not followed the urgings of the AFL to call it off. In Harris’s view, the movement of the BSCP was also “a journey of faith, faith in their leader and faith in their cause.” Randolph, Webster, and others, Harris said, “kept the faith, and they won.”14
By defining their struggle as part of the larger fight of organized labor as well as the increasingly strident demands of African Americans for full citizenship rights, Harris shows how the BSCP not only helped to transform the U. S. labor movement but also changed the politics and civil rights struggles of the black community. Encouraged by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition and the enactment of new labor legislation outlawing company unions, Randolph, his associates, and the BSCP together gained the right to bargain collectively on behalf of black workers and entered the predominantly white house of labor (i.e., the AFL) as a full-fledged member. The Brotherhood became both a union and a broader political movement and tackled discrimination by both the company and organized labor. It also became the chief instrument urging the larger black community to place “labor organizations—and solidarity in general” at the forefront of African American advancement efforts. Although Randolph and his associates billed themselves as “New Negroes,” they were by no means entirely integrationists. They accepted white philanthropic support, professional expertise, and endorsements, but they insisted that the BSCP leadership remain in African American hands. It was their capacity to function in this vein that allowed Randolph and the BSCP to emerge at the forefront of the World War II–era March on Washington Movement that produced Executive Order 8802, established the federal Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), and helped to spearhead the emergence of the modern black freedom movement.15
During the closing years of the twentieth century and the opening of the new millennium, a fresh wave of Randolph and BSCP scholarship built upon the richest base of documentary evidence to date. Recent studies draw upon the personal papers of Randolph; the organizational records of the BSCP; heretofore little consulted manuscript collections in presidential libraries, including those of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower; and a large number of oral histories with