Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      3

      A. Philip Randolph

       Emerging Socialist Radical

      ERIC ARNESEN

      Settling permanently in New York in 1911, Asa Philip Randolph was but one among tens of thousands of African Americans who sought opportunity, freedom, and adventure beyond the stifling confines of the segregated South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With a religious background, modest but solid education, and notable lack of material resources of any kind, he initially exhibited few distinguishing characteristics that would set him apart from other migrants of the pre–World War I era. Yet in a remarkably brief time, Randolph had earned a reputation as one of the leading “Negro Marxians” whose radicalism eclipsed that of even the dominant civil rights proponent W. E. B. Du Bois. The magazine he cofounded and coedited, the Messenger, became, in the view of fellow Jacksonville-native-turned-New Yorker James Weldon Johnson, “the most widely circulated of all the radical periodicals and probably the most influential.” According to the anti-radical Lusk Committee of the New York State legislature, the journal was published by “one of the most active groups of Negro radicals” who were devoted to promoting the “principles of internationalism and the stimulation of the class struggle.” The Messenger, concluded Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, was “by long odds the most able and the most dangerous of all the Negro publications.”¹ In the eyes of their contemporary opponents, according to the black social scientist Abram L. Harris, Randolph (and his collaborator, Chandler Owen) had become “wild-eyed ‘Reds’ of the deepest dye.”² The man who “has been hailed at times as the greatest leader of his race since Frederick Douglass,” as one journalist put it in 1959, began his political career squarely on the socialist Left.³

      How had Randolph transformed himself from a son of an American Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister in Florida to a socialist and “New Crowd Negro” during and after World War I? That Randolph threw himself into the radical milieu of Progressive Era New York and emerged as a militant socialist and civil rights advocate during World War I is well documented and understood. The origins and evolution of his radicalism are less clear. Tracing those origins is no simple task. In a 1944 portrait, Rosenwald Fund president Edwin R. Embree captured the difficulties in reconstructing Randolph’s early political journey. “About these early days—the life in Florida and the struggles in New York—Randolph does not talk much,” he explained. “It is clear that his interests are not in friends or family, but in ‘the cause.’ And there is no record that gives more than a vague picture of his life up to the time of the First World War and the beginning of his long fight for labor and the common man. From then on the record is full and heroic. And about these ‘serious things’ Randolph is ready enough to talk.”⁴ Because Randolph himself is virtually the only source on his early life and the development of his political vision, his recollections must be scrutinized carefully. But when they are combined with a more solid evidentiary trail from 1916 onward, it is possible to chart Randolph’s political trajectory. The radicalism he eventually adopted was an idiosyncratic one, drawing upon elements of both socialist and African American protest traditions. A lyrical and sometimes acerbic writer, Randolph was never a particularly original thinker. Rather, the power of his arguments lay in the strong moralism he brought to his analyses of American society, his ability to synthesize and apply socialist doctrine to the plight of African Americans, his uncompromising critique of existing black leadership and advocacy of aggressive New Negro radicalism, and his ever-optimistic belief that, however dire the situation, fundamental progressive change was indeed possible. The positions he advanced put him at odds not only with the U.S. government and СКАЧАТЬ