Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
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 a life of political engagement in his youth, his Jacksonville upbringing constituted fertile soil in which the seeds his father planted might later grow. But if Du Bois succeeded in opening Randolph’s eyes in 1903 and pushing him toward a more radical outlook, it would take less than a decade and a half for the student to reject the teacher’s insights as wholly inadequate to the task of the liberation of the race. Although conceding that Du Bois possessed “more intelligence than most Negro editors,” Randolph and his intellectual and editorial partner, Chandler Owen, denounced the NAACP leader as “comparatively ignorant of the world problems of sociological and economic significance.”17 Du Bois might be “the most distinguished Negro in the United States,” but his advice was “puerile and effete . . . not worthy of an alleged Negro sociologist.”18 If Randolph had drawn inspiration from Du Bois, he was later quick to put considerable distance between his own radicalism and that of Du Bois.
Whatever his thinking as a teenager, Asa’s geographical horizons had to expand before his political horizons could. The road to an activist politics first carried Randolph to New York, where he immersed himself in new intellectual and radical communities profoundly different from those in his native Jacksonville. This brings us to the second part of this biographical introduction: a political coming-of-age story that began when Asa joined the migrant stream that was steadily carrying the South’s Talented Tenth to a region that would soon be called a “land of hope.” The twenty-two-year-old Asa arrived in New York City in 1911, at the end of a small but steady movement of southern blacks to the North that had tripled the city’s black population between 1890 and 1910. In some ways, the city to which he moved depressingly resembled the world he left behind. Just over a decade before his arrival, one journalist had concluded that the “prospect for the Negro in New York City is not very encouraging,” for not only had an anti-black riot in 1900 revealed police indifference to blacks’ safety but the “opportunities of Negroes are less in New York than they have ever been, and there does not seem any likelihood that present conditions will be immediately changed.”19 Any black man or woman attempting to secure employment would have run up against employment barriers that relegated them to menial, unskilled work. The year after Randolph’s arrival, sociologist George Edmund Haynes found that “the large majority of Negroes are employed today in occupations of domestic and personal service” in New York, and that their relegation to such jobs was the result of “the historical conditions of servitude, of a prejudice on the part of white workmen and employers,” and the “inefficiency of Negro-wage-earners.”20 The job market hardly beckoned; opportunities remained restricted.
For a number of years, Asa Randolph joined thousands of other black New Yorkers, old timers and new arrivals alike, in maneuvering the low-wage common labor market and living what one observer called the “hand-to-mouth existence so common to Negro migrants of that period.”21 He kept few jobs for long. At one point he was a hall-boy in apartment buildings on 89th Street where a cousin worked as a janitor; his effort to become a waiter on a Fall River Line steamship ended quickly when he was fired either for attempting to unionize his fellow waiters over poor conditions or for screwing up a white customer’s order for little neck clams, or for both. (His accounts of that incident vary.) Then, he commuted from New York to Jersey City to work as a counter waiter boy in a restaurant.22 During these years before the U.S. entry into World War I, Randolph barely eked out a living on his own wages.
If his work experiences resembled those available to blacks in the South, in other ways Randolph’s New York was a world away from the Jacksonville of his youth. The rapid relocation of Manhattan’s black population north to Harlem was in the process of transforming that community into what would soon be viewed as the “Negro Mecca,” the vibrant, cultural capital of black America. Although “Harlem wasn’t the Harlem it is now,” an elderly old Randolph reminisced, its “Negro artistic and literary life . . . was developing rapidly.” Harlem, already home to a “type of Negro artist, musicians, singers and so forth, that were on a high order from the point of view of quality,” appealed to the young Randolph’s vocational aspiration: to become an actor. As