Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
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, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics, 10–12.
24. Bynum, A. Philip Randolph, xi, 72–74; Bates, Pullman 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,