Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

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      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, СКАЧАТЬ