Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten

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      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 American economic institutions but also with black conservatives, civil rights militants, black nationalists, and the small but vocal Communist movement as well. Despite hostility from the Right and 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