Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ