Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ