Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten

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СКАЧАТЬ Left, Randolph staked out provocative political positions and maintained his intellectual independence throughout the tumultuous era of the Great War and its aftermath.

      Asa (as he was called as a boy) was born in Florida in 1889, the child of a self-educated, poor itinerant minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, James W. Randolph, and his wife, Elizabeth Robinson Randolph.⁵ The Randolph household inculcated two enduring traits in Asa. The first was a passionate commitment to education, which Asa and his older brother, James, acquired from multiple sources. Outside of formal schooling, they attended Sunday school and evening church class meetings and received tutoring from neighbors. (“By the time we got to school,” Randolph remarked in 1966, “we had the equivalent of a primary school education.”) Their out-of-school education covered the spectrum from religion and history to politics and current events. Whatever the subject, the subtext of race was never far from the surface. “Reading the Bible aloud was as much a part of the routine of our home as suppertime,” Asa recounted. But the biblical history Asa and James were steeped in challenged racially traditional accounts. “Jesus Christ was not white,” the Reverend Randolph would tell his sons. “Angels have no color. God has none.” He repeatedly emphasized the simple “historic fact that Jesus Christ, God, Moses, Peter, Paul and the great characters of the Bible weren’t white as pictured, but were colored or swarthy.” Reflecting back upon his father’s stories, Asa never knew if his father was aware of what he called the “economic, political, social and psychological motivation and machinery” behind the depiction of biblical figures as white. But the impact was profound: His father’s stories provided a “deep sense of solace and belonging and inner faith in the future.”⁶

      From their parents and their instructors, the Randolph boys absorbed an abiding passion for reading, learning, and intellectual engagement that distinguished them throughout their teenage years. Both made extensive use of a small segregated library in town and pestered their father to buy them books from old bookstores.⁷ The “dominant climate of the home was ideas,” Asa recounted. With books by Herbert Spencer and Thomas Paine under their belt, James and Asa would engage in “intellectual gymnastics” and “intellectual entertainment” by debating at length the existence of God. These “intellectualities,” as Asa called them, could engage the Randolph boys “for hours, sometimes daily.”⁸ Their training at the private, religious Cookman Institute, where they excelled, immersed them in a classical education.

      The second trait inculcated in Asa was an interest in politics and political commitment. Race again was central. “I spent a lot of my time accompanying my father to his churches in various parts of Florida,” Randolph remarked. As he got to know his fathers’ parishioners, Asa “listened to the stories . . . about work, racial prejudice and things of that sort.”⁹ From the time he was five or six through his teenage years, Asa and his brother would listen closely to the presiding bishops and church elders preach and review the year’s accomplishments. The Reverend Randolph took pride in introducing his sons to the visiting dignitaries. The highlight for the youngest Randolph—“one of the most exciting and hair-raising incidents” he had ever witnessed—took place during a speech by the legendary Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. According to Randolph’s recollection, the “ex-slave, first colored chaplain to the U.S. Army, and former member of the Georgia Legislature, pulled a 38-caliber revolver out of his pocket and laid it on the Bible and exclaimed with a sense of burning passion and anger that he had to carry this weapon in some of the jungles of the South in order to be able to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.” The shocked congregation burst into enthusiastic endorsement at this “exhibition of matchless courage.” As a “fire-eating black prophet of Negro racial salvation,” Turner was one of Randolph’s boyhood heroes. Having been introduced to Turner by his father and having shaken his hand was, as Asa later put it, an “unforgettable trans-figuratively creative experience,” an inspiration “which caused me to feel I could storm the heavens in search of freedom and justice for black Americans.”¹⁰ With the memory of black Republican leadership during Reconstruction “very much alive in his mind,” Reverend Randolph “talked forever of the great days when Negro Republicans had served in the Congress and the Senate.” The broader pantheon of black heroes included AME Church founders Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, the early nineteenth-century black businessman and abolitionist James Forten, the Haitian slave rebel and revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, and the abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass.¹¹

      The Reverend James and Elizabeth Randolph expected significant things from their sons. Their emphasis on education, achievement, morality, and community instilled not just a sense of racial pride but self-confidence as well. The Randolph boys were “constantly and continuously” being told that “You are as able, you are as competent, you have as much intellectuality as any individual, any white boy of your age and even older than you are, and you are not supposed to bow and take a back seat for anybody.” Those lectures had their intended effect, for Asa and James “never felt that we were inferior to any white boy, never had that concept at all.”¹² But the parental cultivation of pride and confidence were not ends in themselves, for the Reverend Randolph sought to direct his sons—his younger one in particular—toward the ministry where they could use their talents to spread the Lord’s word and, perhaps equally important, to do things that “will help other people as well as yourself.” Randolph recalled his father praising his sons’ verbal abilities and academic skills and his reminding them of how much faith their teachers had placed in them. They “believe you’re unusually gifted chaps,” he informed James and Asa, and “you’ve got to make use of that.” The goal, he stressed, was to “create conditions that will help the people farther down who don’t have your opportunities or don’t have your gifts.”¹³

      Asa did not join the ministry, but he did absorb his father’s larger life lesson about leadership in the service of the race. Whether he did so at the time remains unclear. At the age of eighty-three, he seemed to locate the specific origins of his political activism in his high school years. His youthful daydreams, he explained, involved “carrying on some program for the abolition of racial discrimination.” Personal monetary success was not part of his agenda. What concerned him, by his own account, was a sense of obligation that the young African American had to “make a place in the world that would benefit more people than himself” and “to engage in various pursuits that would not only help Negroes but help the country and help abolish racial discrimination.”¹⁴ Perhaps he was guided by W. E. B. Du Bois’s pointed critique of the racial accommodationism of the then-most powerful black leader, Booker T. Washington. One journalist explained in 1969 that a fourteen-year-old Randolph “found direction for his life” when he first encountered Du Bois’s 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. “Negroes of superior intellect, said Du Bois, should help their fellow Negroes rise as high as they are equipped to,” explained the reporter. That book planted the idea of the “Talented Tenth” in his mind. And “Randolph decided he would be one of the 10th.”¹⁵

      This was no small ambition for a poor high school student coming of age at a time that scholar Rayford Logan later identified as the “nadir” for black Americans. Perhaps Randolph and later journalists faithfully rendered his intellectual and political trajectory; perhaps an elderly man was reading back onto his early youth the passions of his young adulthood. Whatever the case, nothing in particular stood out in his academic or extracurricular life to confirm definitively his account. Growing up in the stifling and dangerous Jim Crow South, the young Randolph pursued his studies, enthusiastically played baseball, and excelled at singing. While imagining for himself a life in the theater, he patiently learned his Latin, practiced his elocution in school and in church, became an avid reader, and emerged a skilled debater. “Our home was marked and distinguished for prayers, poverty and pride,” he later observed in an unpublished autobiographical reflection, and from his parents he acquired self-confidence, racial self-respect, a disinterest in material goods, a stern sense of morality, and a commitment to serve the race.¹⁶ All of these traits would serve him exceptionally well when he explicitly chose a life of progressive and civil rights activism. Even if he had not actually envisioned СКАЧАТЬ