Читать книгу Reframing Randolph - Andrew E. Kersten - Страница 10
Оглавление2
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 for social justice.
Studies by Sterling D. Spero, Abram L. Harris, Brailsford R. 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 escalating postwar civil rights movement, including the Montgomery bus boycott and a series of school 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 surviving porters themselves. One indication of the growing magnitude of the latter sources was the 1989 publication by the University of Illinois Press of folklorist Jack Santino’s Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters. Whereas much of Randolph and BSCP scholarship focused on leaders and leadership issues, Santino’s book brought the lives of porters themselves into clearer view. Based upon multiple interviews with nearly thirty Pullman porters as well as Rosina Corrothers Tucker, a past president of the Ladies Auxiliary of the BSCP, Miles of Smiles offers unique insights into virtually every facet of the porter’s life and labor from the inside out. The volume also includes photographs from the porters’ family collections. These self-images contrast sharply with the “media images” released to the public by the Pullman Company. As Santino described his effort, “This book contains the porters’ own understanding of their past and their occupational lives. As such it presents a kind of folk history. . . . The data enrich the scholarship discourse on Pullman porters by adding the porters’ own descriptions of their culture to the data historians have provided.”16
Working with an expanding variety of sources as well as new conceptual approaches, recent scholarship advances our understanding of Randolph and the BSCP along several closely interrelated lines. Studies by Beth T. Bates, Cornelius L. Bynum, Melinda Chauteauvert, Paula Pfeffer, and Cynthia Taylor, to name a few, provide fresh insights into Randolph’s “charismatic” leadership, political ideology, and religiosity; inter- and intra-racial alliance-building activities; and the impact of gender conventions and social practices on the work of the BSCP.17 In seeking to understand the origins of Randolph’s political beliefs, scholars have grappled with the intersection of ideas developed in the Jim Crow urban South with the emerging radical political, social, and cultural milieu of New York City. Many have probed the influence of Harlem as an emerging global black community, of studies at City College of New York, and of membership in the Socialist Party on Randolph’s thinking and social activism. Contemporary research also takes issue with a large body of scholarship that underscores Randolph’s a-religiosity or “atheism,” stretching from Spero and Harris’s The Black Worker through World War II and beyond. Most prevailing accounts of Randolph’s leadership ideology cast him as a “doubter” or as areligious. Randolph’s own rhetoric during the most radical phase of his career as a labor and civil rights leader reinforced this view. Moreover, as coeditor of the Messenger during World War I and the 1920s, Randolph adopted an outlook that seemed to question the value of organized religion. The Messenger opposed “all creeds of church and social orders” that hampered the fight for social justice. “Freedom is my Bride, Liberty my Angel of Light, Justice my God.”18
In her model study of Randolph’s religious ideas and commitments, however, historian Cynthia Taylor shows how Randolph’s leadership ideology and career as a labor radical and civil rights activist were deeply rooted in his African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church background. Taylor locates Randolph’s religious sensibilities in the household of his AME parents (his father was a minister) and their ongoing engagement with the day-to-day life of their community. Theirs was a religion that preached self-defense as well as salvation. On one occasion, Randolph witnessed how his mother and father determined to use armed force if necessary to thwart the lynching of a black man accused of sexually molesting a white woman. Taylor persuasively argues that Randolph imbibed the elements of a religious culture that took the form of a “social gospel,” eschewing the tradition of “getting religion” for the hereafter in favor of an activist faith aimed at changing conditions in this world. Upon arriving in Harlem, Randolph blended the ideas of the Socialist Party with his own convictions growing out of his southern cultural, social, economic, and political experiences. Over the course of his long career, Randolph’s religious sensibilities and commitments continued to inform and fuel his political activism. Randolph helped to build a solid base of support for black porters among the black clergy during the 1930s; initiated “prayer protests” as part of the March on Washington Movement for defense industry jobs during World War II; and linked the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to the prayer pilgrimages of the 1950s. Following the exceedingly successful prayer pilgrimage of 1957, Randolph formally rejoined the AME church. At the same time, Taylor concludes, the African American church of the 1950s also recovered its “militant social conscience,” and rejoined Randolph.19
Cornelius Bynum reinforced the basic thrust of Taylor’s treatment of Randolph’s religiosity and politics. Through the lens of what he calls “an analytical intellectual history that uses biography to illuminate the origins and evolution of central aspects of Randolph’s thought and activism,” Bynum acknowledges the various ways that life in New York City helped to crystallize Randolph’s thinking and social activism, but he concludes that Randolph’s family, the AME church, the urban South, and Jim Crow established the fundamental groundwork for the later development of Randolph’s radical class and racial analyses of the black condition. Nonetheless, somewhat more so than Taylor, Bynum underscores greater discontinuity and shifts over time, including Randolph’s emphasis on the primacy of class during World War I and early postwar years, and transition to a more flexible analysis of the dynamics of class and race by the mid-1920s and thereafter.20
In addition to revamping our understanding of religion in the development of Randolph’s political ideology, recent studies also underscore the pivotal role of inter- and intra-racial alliance building activities in the success of BSCP campaigns. In her biographical account of Randolph, historian Paula Pfeffer employs the notion of “situational charisma,” and, focusing mainly on the years after World War II, Pfeffer argued, contrary to Harris, that charisma (reinforced by the assistance of associates) helps to explain how Randolph rose to a place of extraordinary influence within the African American community. She adds further that only his capacity to build effective political alliances (through nonviolent direct action strategies) fully explains Randolph’s leadership and the increasing influence of the BSCP. During World War II, the March on Washington Movement—a cross-class African American movement—legitimized the “ideology of civil disobedience” among young African Americans. Although Randolph and the BSCP continued to forge links across class lines within the African American community, for him, interracial alliances with varieties of sympathetic white organizations and constituencies gained increasing sway in the years after World War II. In substantial detail, Pfeffer shows how these alliances developed through such diverse organizations as the National Council for a Permanent FEPC, the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, the Emergency Committee Against Military Jim Crow, and especially the prayer pilgrimages and youth marches on Washington, D.C., to speed up the desegregation of schools during the 1950s. Together, these efforts fueled the emergence and spread of the modern social justice movement that eventually helped to shatter the larger Jim Crow edifice.21
Whereas Pfeffer emphasizes the emergence of powerful interracial alliances in the post–World War II years, historian Beth Bates analyzes the process by which Randolph and the BSCP built networks of support within the black community and helped to transform an often anti-union constituency into an indispensable ally. Basing her research on the BSCP campaign to organize Pullman porters in Chicago, the company’s backyard, Bates convincingly argues that previous studies of the BSCP failed to systematically analyze the relationship between the BSCP and the larger black community. In careful detail, she shows how Randolph and the BSCP gradually built “protest networks” from the ground up. Through the work of black clubwomen (particularly the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Club), the union’s Citizens Committee for the Brotherhood, and a series of labor conferences following the aborted strike of 1928, the intra-racial alliance building activities of the BSCP gradually gained widespread community-based support. This support included the influential Chicago Defender as well as a wide range of religious, civic, and social service organizations (including local branches of the National Urban League and NAACP), as reflected in the rise of the National Negro Congress (NNC) and later the MOWM, although Randolph soon resigned as president of the NNC following disputes over the role of the Communist Party in the organization. Bates convincingly argues that community networks represented “the connective tissue between the porters’ union and the politics of the black community.”22
Another theme in recent historiography is a recurring effort to pinpoint the role of Randolph and the BSCP in the transition of African American politics from an earlier largely dependent “clientage politics” to a new independent politics of protest. According to historian Cornelius Bynum, for example, by the end of World War II, Randolph had evolved a philosophy of social struggle that incorporated notions of “interest group politics and mass action” in the larger civil rights and political struggles of black people in mid-twentieth-century America. In Bynum’s view, these ideas built directly on Randolph’s foundational notions “that genuine social justice required fair access to civil and economic rights and that race and class posed unique challenges for black workers.” In a similar vein, Pfeffer maintains that Randolph’s and the BSCP’s commitment to “nonviolent, direct mass action” facilitated the transition from an older, weaker politics dependent on unreliable white allies to aggressive public demands for equal rights, backed by the power of organizations allied with the BSCP. In her conceptualization of networks of support and alliance-building activities within the black community, Bates emphasizes the role of such networks in the transformation of black political behavior and strategies from what she calls a “politics of civility” or “Old Crowd” politics (a term coined by Randolph and the Messenger), to “New Crowd” politics, characterized by vociferous demands for equal rights from a position of organized strength rather than a position of weakness.23
Although historians and other scholars have not returned to Spero and Harris’s specific critical stance, a renewed critique of Randolph has emerged nonetheless. There were boundaries to Randolph’s conception of equal rights. For example, contemporary scholarship gives substantial attention to notions of manhood, femininity, and gender inequality. In his analysis, Bynum focuses on Randolph’s notion of masculinity or manhood as a critical factor leading him to a vigorous analysis of social justice for African Americans in general and black workers in particular. According to Bynum, notions of manhood articulated by the white socialist Eugene Debs and the black intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, particularly in his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), helped to bridge Randolph’s ideological transition to socialism. Initially, Randolph stood closely with Debs’s formulation of class over race, but over time gravitated toward Du Bois’s race-conscious notion of manhood. Similarly, Beth Bates shows how Randolph and the Brotherhood challenged Pullman’s paternalistic racism through the idiom of manhood rights in the years leading to the company’s recognition of the BSCP as the bargaining agent. Such notions, which were inspired by early Emancipation-era struggles for full citizenship rights, included women as well as men. Although black women faced the brunt of racial and class inequality, they not only joined the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Club in support of the BSCP, but also supported the BSCP’s women’s auxiliary, the Chicago Colored Women’s Economic Council, as wives and other female relatives of porters. Twentieth-century studies of African American women’s history, most notably Deborah Gray White’s Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves (1999), examine the connection between the women of the BSCP and established middle-class African American women’s organizations. Having pursued extensive primary research on the subject, White shows how the porters’ Ladies Auxiliary pressed its members’ middle-class counterparts into greater action on behalf of the black working class. Following a meeting with the National Council of Negro Women, Auxiliary president Helena Wilson wrote to the secretary treasurer of the BSCP unit: “I attended a session of the Council’s Convention . . . and I was not very satisfied with the discussions given to the lower income working groups.” When women answered the call for help from Randolph and the BSCP, they embraced the ideas of manhood and manhood rights as part of the larger ongoing struggle for full human rights.
Yet women’s indispensable support of the BSCP did little to lessen the gender barrier within the union or the workplace. Melinda Chateauvert’s Marching Together offers the most detailed critique of women and gender issues in the BSCP. Chateauvert documents the constraints that gender as well as class and racial conventions and social practices imposed on black women within the union as well as the union’s women’s auxiliary. Although women provided indispensable support to the union, they nonetheless confronted a series of limitations and slights. As Cheateauvert notes, “The Ladies’ Auxiliary was the distaff side of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. . . . Randolph’s propaganda stressed black manhood rights, calling for better working conditions, a family wage, respect from fellow workers, and equal citizenship. But for men to achieve manhood, women must be feminine; Brotherhood rhetoric depicted women as admiring wives, rarely noting their pivotal role in the twelve-year struggle for unionization.”24
In addition to the Ladies’ Auxiliary, some two hundred black women also worked as maids, car cleaners, and “porterettes” for the Pullman Company. Maids belonged to the union, paid dues, and suffered reprisals (including firings) for their union membership and activities. Still, not only did male members of the Brotherhood make it difficult for maids to adopt the notion of “manhood rights” on their own behalf as workers, but female members of the Auxiliary also refused to endorse female Pullman employees as members of the union with workplace and other grievances alongside those of men. Invariably, Auxiliary activities focused on ways to buttress the cause of male porters by increasing the efficiency of their wives and other female relatives as homemakers. Pullman maids found few sympathetic forums for voicing their particular complaints against the company. In 1929, when the AFL grudgingly granted the Brotherhood a federal charter, the union dropped “and Maids” from its earlier name: the “Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids.”
Following union victory against the Pullman Company in 1936, Randolph and the BSCP moved from the rhetoric of “manhood” and manhood rights to a notion of “black worker,” which assumed a masculine identity and further displaced attention from the special difficulties and issues facing female Pullman employees. Most damaging, in 1937, when the company signed its first contract with the BSCP, the agreement excluded maids from its provisions and protections, including seniority rights. Even so, the women of the Auxiliary sometimes referred to themselves as “members of the first international labor organization of Negro women in the world.” Against these and many other odds, Chateauvert makes clear, Pullman women helped to propel the MOWM of the 1940s and 1960s as well as the prayer pilgrimages and youth marches on Washington in 1957, 1958, and 1959 that led to the signal moment of King, Randolph, and other luminaries on the Washington mall in 1963.25
Historical case studies focusing directly on Randolph and the BSCP by no means represent the full range of research on the subject. More recently, specialized research on African American urban history, the history of black nationalism, and the history of black radicalism and internationalism expands the scope of Randolph and BSCP scholarship. Studies by Clarence Lang, Martha Biondi, and other twentieth-century African American urban historians include substantial analyses of Randolph and the Brotherhood. In his groundbreaking study of St. Louis, Lang examines the grassroots organizing activities of porters with abiding sensitivity to questions of gender and gender inequities as well as class divisions. “The porters’ casual practice of neglecting women members in union affairs and agendas was reified in policy, buttressing the idea that women’s ideal role was as porters’ wives, or members of BSCP auxiliaries. This was an insult added to injury particularly because black women had been central to sustaining the union since its inception.” In her book on post–World War II New York City, Martha Biondi offers a telling assessment of the strains and conflicts between Randolph and the labor movement beyond the BSCP, namely the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC). Formed in 1950–1951, the NNLC, Biondi persuasively argues, bridged “Black-labor left formations of the 1940s and those of the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond, such as the Negro American Labor Council and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.” Others have examined Randolph’s legacy in social politics. In this area, for example, historian Andrew Kersten explores the question of FEPC politics at the regional level through the lens of local community-based politics. As he puts it, “The experiences of the FEPC in the Midwest highlight the interconnections between the federal government, national associations, and community organizations.”26
Other scholars have focused critical attention on the complicated relationships involving Randolph, the BSCP, and black nationalists and radicals. In addition to Randolph’s relationship with Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA),27 a significant body of scholarship, including biographical studies of W. E. B. Du Bois and Hubert Harrison, probe Randolph’s relationship with other black activists, including members of the Communist Party. Historian Minkah Makalani opens a new window on the history of black radicalism by challenging earlier understandings that tie the subject of black internationalism to the history of the Communist Party. As he succinctly states, his book “deploys diaspora as an analytic to rescue radical black internationalism from the narrative sutures of international communism.”
In his innovative transnational study of twentieth-century liberation movements in India and the United States, historian Nico Slate advances the goal of a new historiography of black internationalism. Employing the notion of “colored cosmopolitanism,” Slate reinforces the tie between Randolph’s religious sensibilities and his radical politics. Randolph not only “framed the lessons of Gandhi as Christian in spirit and American in practice,” but also “imagined a mass-based Gandhi satyagraha grounded in colored cosmopolitanism and led by an all-Black organization in partnership with white liberals and Gandhian activists.” Slate shows how, following Gandhi’s initiation of the “Quit India movement” in the late summer of 1942, Randolph and the MOWM looked increasingly toward the Indian independence movement for inspiration, and in the process highlights the ways that “transnational linkages could reinforce a Black militancy that exceeded the American nation while making claims upon it.”28
Although recent studies establish firm connections among the porters, Randolph, the BSCP, and the successes of the modern twentieth-century black freedom movement, they also suggest that this trajectory was by no means inevitable. Ongoing class, racial, nationalist, and internationalist struggles both complicated and enhanced the political career of A. Philip Randolph and the labor battles of the BSCP. World War I and the 1920s opened radical new possibilities for the African American struggle for freedom and economic emancipation. The labor demands of the American war effort brought rising numbers of southern and Caribbean blacks to American cities, particularly New York and Chicago. Some of these African Americans joined the Socialist Party and championed the cause of poor and working-class people across the color line. They called for a new interracial labor movement and worked to build better bridges between black and white workers.
Randolph, Chandler Owen, Hubert Harrison, Cyril Briggs, and others who joined the Harlem unit of the Socialist Party advanced a radical class analysis of the “race problem” during the war years, but they soon decried the party’s efforts to reduce all facets of the “race problem” to issues of class inequities. In 1917, in order to give voice to their concerns, West Indian–born Cyril Briggs and a cadre of other African Americans broke from the Socialist Party and formed the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB).29 In the columns of the Crusader, the official organ of the ABB, Briggs called for a concerted struggle against colonialism abroad and racism at home. In this way, the ABB anticipated the later “Double-V” campaign of World War II. Like Briggs, the West Indian socialist Hubert Harrison also abandoned the Socialist Party and spearheaded the formation of a new organization, the Liberty League, and its publication, the Voice, to address the neglect of race issues by members of the radical Left. Harrison’s break with the Socialist Party became even more pronounced when he became a contributing editor to Marcus Garvey’s widely disseminated Negro World newspaper. Following his break with the Socialists, Harrison declared, the “roots of class-consciousness . . . inhere in a temporary economic order; whereas the roots of race-consciousness must of necessity survive any and all changes in the economic order.”30
In 1925, when Randolph helped to launch the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids and promoted trade unionism as the principal vehicle for the economic emancipation of black workers, the path ahead remained open and full of alternative possibilities. While Randolph had vehemently eschewed Garvey and the UNIA’s brand of black nationalism in favor of labor solidarity, as head of the Brotherhood he increasingly supported a notion of race pride and racial unity that echoed Garvey’s ideas about race pride, beauty, and the intelligence of black people.31 Following Randolph’s break with the NNC over the issue of Communist Party influence in the organization, his anti-Communist stance became legendary. In early 1941, despite Communist Party attempts to stymie the effort, the March on Washington Movement, under the leadership of Randolph and the BSCP, resulted in the creation of the FEPC and growing efforts to desegregate the nation’s defense program.
In the aftermath of World War II, African Americans confronted the limits of struggle using established fair employment commissions. They renewed their efforts to build independent all-black labor unions like the National Negro Labor Council and intensified demonstrations against employment discrimination. Because of the NNLC’s close association with the American Communist Party, however, it became the focus of a vigorous wave of Cold War–inspired attacks from Randolph, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Assailed as a tool of the Soviet Union, the NNLC declined after about 1956. In the meantime, as historian Will Jones notes in his award-winning essay on the MOWM, while early postwar black trade unionists “failed to sustain links between civil rights and labor activism at the national level,” local efforts in such diverse cities as Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and Detroit resulted in the forging of “a powerful coalition of civil rights and labor activists,” as well as inspiring the formation of the Negro American Labor Council in 1959. The NALC strengthened links between African American labor struggles and the expanding nonviolent direct action movement for change in all aspects of African American life. Following his election as president, Randolph underscored his renewed commitment to militant labor and civil rights activism: “We reject ‘tokenism,’ that thin veneer of acceptance masquerading as democracy. . . . [that] history has placed upon the negro . . . and [believe that] the Negro alone [has] the basic responsibility to complete the uncompleted civil war revolution through keeping the fires of freedom burning in the civil rights movement.”32
* * *
Published between 1931 and 1959, the first generation of scholarship on Randolph relied almost exclusively on the Messenger magazine, the African American press, and written contracts between the porters and the Pullman Company. While there were significant differences in focus and interpretation among the first wave of researchers, including Spero and Harris, Brazeal, Garfinkel, and others, these scholars emphasized the centrality of Randolph’s role (for better or for worse) in organizing the Pullman porters under extraordinary economic, social, cultural, and political constraints. Barriers to organizing black porters not only included a repressive corporate structure, a hostile white labor movement, and racially biased governmental policies, but also influential elite-dominated black community institutions that distrusted unions and urged porters to avoid antagonizing their employer.
Under the growing impact of the modern black freedom movement during the 1960s and 1970s, a second group of Randolph studies surveyed a broader range of sources and deepened our understanding of the organizing efforts of Randolph, the porters, and their union. New sources included extensive oral interviews with surviving porters and voluminous manuscript collections of relevant public agencies like the U.S. Mediation Board as well as the private papers of the BSCP, the NAACP, and the National Urban League. Based upon this enlarged body of evidence, studies by Jervis Anderson, Theodore Kornwiebel, William H. Harris, and others broadened the cast of characters to include Milton P. Webster and other BSCP organizers and deepened our understanding of Randolph’s early years as coeditor (with Chandler Owen) of the radical Messenger magazine.
Over the past two decades, a new wave of research and writing built upon an even broader range of primary source materials has dramatically transformed interpretations of Randolph’s historical place and significance. Available records now include the collected papers of Randolph himself; a fuller set of Pullman Company records at the Newberry Library in Chicago; and, perhaps most important, a large and impressive roster of oral interviews with grassroots, rank-and-file porters and maids as well as previously little known female leadership figures like Rosina Carrothers Tucker, a porter widow and former president of the Ladies Auxiliary of the BSCP. Recent scholarship not only examines Randolph’s abiding commitment to economic justice for black workers and full citizenship for black people, but also explores his notion of “manhood” and “manhood” rights and questions of gender equity for black men and women. Moreover, in addition to revisiting and reinterpreting Randolph’s religiosity and the role of African American religious culture in shaping his political ideology, contemporary scholarship also underscores Randolph’s and the BSCP’s global connections and influences, including particularly the impact of Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha and of the Indian independence movement on the MOWM. By carefully building upon previous generations of scholarship as well as an expanding range of sources and conceptual approaches, contemporary research enables a new and more comprehensive understanding of Randolph, the man; the union; and the modern black freedom movement.
NOTES
1. Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement, (1931; repr. New York: Atheneum, 1968), 398, 459. For an excellent synthesis of recent scholarship on Randolph and the BSCP, see Andrew E. Kersten, A. Philip Randolph: A Life in the Vanguard (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006). Kersten also provides a comprehensive bibliography of secondary and primary sources on the subject.
2. Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 430–60; Brailsford R. Brazeal, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters: Its Origin and Development (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945); and Herbert Garfinkel, When Negroes March: The March on Washington Movement in the Organizational Politics for FEPC (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959).
3. Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 430–31.
4. Ibid., 399–-401, 431–37, 459–60.
5. Brazeal, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 21–24, 39–40, 42–56.
6. Ibid., 233.
7. Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 8–9, 118.
8. Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (1972; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Daniel S. Davis, Mr. Black Labor: The Story of A. Philip Randolph, Father of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1972); Theodore Kornwiebel, Jr., No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917–1928 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975); and William H. Harris, Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925–37 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).
9. Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, 285–95, 298–305.
10. Davis, Mr. Black Labor, 156–63.
11. Kornwiebel, No Crystal Stair, 274.
12. Ibid., 106–7, 208–0, 272–74.
13. Harris, Keeping the Faith, xi, 218–21, 223.
14. Ibid., 111, 222–25.
15. Ibid., 111, 218–21, 223–25.
16. Jack Santino, Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 3–4, 130–31. Also see Joseph F. Wilson, Tearing Down the Color Bar: A Documentary History and Analysis of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and Lyn Hughes, An Anthology of Respect: The Pullman Porters National Registry of African American Railroad Employees (Chicago: Lyn Hughes, 2009).
17. Paula F. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 63–105; Cornelius L. Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Cynthia Taylor, A. Philip Randolph: The Religious Journey of an African American Labor Leader, (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Larry Tye, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004); and Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
18. This and the following discussion of Cynthia Taylor’s book are based on my review in the AME Church Review 122 (July–September 2006): 102–3. Also see Taylor, A. Philip Randolph, 1–2.
19. Taylor, A. Philip Randolph, 40–41, 51–53, 219–30.
20. Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights, xi, 28–62.
21. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, 2–3, 97, 134, 136–37.
22. Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics, 10–11, 78–86, 100–1, 120–21, 135–42, 149–51, 161–65.
23. Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights, xi, xviii, xix, 165–200; Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, 2–5, 55–65; and Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics, 10–12.
24. Bynum, A. Philip Randolph, xi, 72–74; Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics, 10; and Chateauvert, Marching Together, xi.
25. Chateauvert, Marching Together, xii, 39, 54–55, 60–61, 83, 197.
26. Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 34–35; Andrew E. Kersten, Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 3; Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 256–68; and Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 12, 121, 182, 193, 238.
27. Ula Y. Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jaques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 42, 149, 160, 174, 207; Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 89, 109–10, 139–40, 348–49, 363–64; Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1976), 22–66, 110–50, 273–343; Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1986), 7–23, 108–52, 223–72; and Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vols. 1–3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 and 1984).
28. Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 11, 32, 34–35, 105–06, 121–23; Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 2–3, 213–14; David L. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 57–60, 468–69; Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 160–75; Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 13–14, 181–83, 287, 295–97; Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 36–59; and Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 103–21.
29. Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, 83–119; Perry, Hubert Harrison, 296–99; Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, 6–44; Taylor, A. Philip Randolph, 37–125; Harris, Keeping the Faith, 26–65. For a succinct but scathing critique of Randolph’s legacy, see the essay by Manning Marable, “A. Philip Randolph & the Foundations of Black American Socialism,” Radical America 14, no. 2 (1980): 6–32. As the studies under review in this essay suggest and the editors of this volume note, most Randolph and BSCP studies provide a more positive assessment of Randolph’s life as a labor, civil, and human rights activist than Marable allowed.
30. Robert A. Hill, “Introduction: Racial and Radical: Cyril V. Briggs, The Crusader Magazine, and the African Blood Brotherhood,” in The Crusader, Vol. 1, September 1918–August 1919 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987), v–lxxiii; Perry, Hubert Harrison, 1–18; and Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, 120–21.
31. Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, 120–86; Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, 6–44; Taylor, A. Philip Randolph, 37–84; Harris, Keeping the Faith, 26–65; Martin, Race First, 22–66, 110–50, 273–343; and Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey, 7–23, 108–52, 223–72.
32. Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 256–57, 264–65, 279–83; William P. Jones, “The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class,” Labor 7, no. 3 (2010): 38–40; and Robert H. Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 170.
