Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
were disappointed by the cancelation of the planned 1941 march on Washington, they organized locally for a possible revival of the idea. And, while they thought nationally, they acted right where they were. Lucander shows that local women like Eugenie Settles and Pearl Maddox were instrumental in helping to change political and economic conditions in their respective cities. Measureable gains were the result of this activism, as public pressure compelled employers to open their factories to African American men and women and forced store owners to cater to all customers, not just those who could pass for white. Although it was short lived, the MOWM at the local level—and the women central to organizing many of its efforts—were agents for change even as they operated within the boundaries of gender norms in the 1940s.
While the MOWM dissolved in the wake of World War II, Randolph’s activities in the areas of fair employment, desegregation of the military, and racial democratization of organized labor persisted. In his chapter, William P. Jones focuses on the final major organizational vehicle Randolph created to mobilize a mass base behind his twin aspirations for civil and labor rights: the Negro American Labor Council (NALC). Launched in 1960, when Randolph was seventy-one years old, the NALC, like the BSCP and the MOWM before it, coordinated efforts to fight racism and discrimination in America generally and within the labor movement in particular. Jones argues that of the political formations Randolph created, the NALC has been the least studied by civil rights and labor historians, though it had the most direct impact on the landmark civil rights laws of the period. Like Randolph’s previous groups, the NALC had both a strong local following and a national influence, and in industrial urban centers its branches pushed for civil rights reform and greater democracy within the AFL-CIO. Fair and full employment, open housing laws and ordinances, equal access to public accommodations, equality in education, and voting rights topped the organization’s concerns—although, as Jones describes, black women activists had to publicly disrupt the NALC’s founding convention in order to have their interests included and their leadership acknowledged. From this standpoint, the NALC inspired a new generation of civil rights workers while continuing the work begun by civil rights activists at the turn of the twentieth century. Similarly, the NALC continued the battle within the house of labor. Randolph’s nemesis, AFL-CIO president George Meany, begrudgingly gave ground to his long-time union brother. As Jones illustrates, Randolph successfully positioned the NALC on a national stage in order to pressure Meany and the AFL-CIO into support for civil rights. The critical moment came in 1963 when the NALC spearheaded the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Afterwards, Meany and the AFL-CIO gave their formal support to President Kennedy’s civil rights bill. Thus, despite tensions that arose among civil rights and labor activists within the NALC, Randolph’s last civil rights organization was as successful as it was short-lived.
The fissures in the civil rights movement that were already generally evident in the early 1960s—and specifically inside organizations such as the NALC—led to cracks and collapses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Younger activists separated themselves from older ones, and while some maintained their adherence to nonviolence, others adopted strategies of armed self-help. Some sought to keep ties with the labor movement, while many appealed to black nationalist sentiments of group solidarity, independence, and sovereignty. As Jerald Podair writes, all of these issues and more were at the center of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy. Randolph, for his part, had to choose between those in the civil rights movement who were advocating local control and race-centered solutions to the educational and community crises in New York City, and those who were committed to the teachers’ union. In backing the latter, Randolph set himself apart and never regained the stature he once held among black freedom activists. He was not able to make a big tent of liberals and radicals on the Left to collectively solve the problems in New York City. His goal of an interracial, interdenominational, intergenerational, and cross-political movement was as unrealized in the 1960s and 1970s as it had been in the 1930s and 1940s. Podair concludes that Randolph’s vision of a combined civil rights and labor rights movement no longer had much meaning in the final half of the twentieth century. His opponents in this conflict, who under other circumstances could have been his allies, favored black community empowerment over interracialism. To state it simply, Podair maintains that African American grassroots activists chose race over class, if by “class” one means support for the teachers’ union. Yet, as Podair’s narrative indicates, given the predominantly white ethnic character of the union, the teachers to a large extent chose “identity politics” as well. Ultimately, the controversy—and Randolph’s role within it—powerfully demonstrated the vexing situations that could occur when race and class collided as well as intersected.
Taken together, these essays demonstrate that Randolph and the organizations he developed and led remain consistent and compelling subjects of historical inquiry. From a historiographical standpoint, discussing Randolph is relevant to several current scholarly conversations. Randolph’s life and work fit well within the debate about race and class in the radical movements of the twentieth century. What was Randolph’s view of the importance of class in American society? Did those concerns outweigh considerations of race? What were the advantages and realities of Randolph’s efforts as he tried to deal with both the marginalization of black workers because they were black, and the exploitation of working-class laborers because they were at the bottom of the political economy? Further, in the realm of labor and working-class history, Randolph and the Pullman porters union stand as potent emblems of independent black worker self-organization within the house of labor. A counterhegemonic element within the AFL, the BSCP was also a model of working-class agency and institution building in the black communal spaces beyond the point of production. Here, the union formed a vital touchstone for a national African American public sphere and the nucleus of a succession of black freedom organizations, including the National Negro Congress, the March on Washington Movement, and the Negro American Labor Council. At the same time, with the BSCP leadership’s focus on male breadwinner wages, and the eventual exclusion of maids from its membership, the union and its president serve as a troubling example of the discrimination against black working-class women on the basis of gender as well as race and class. To our eyes, Randolph’s record was mixed, but he was clearly conscious of the gendered nature of his organizations and politics. Overall, this emergent scholarly emphasis on autonomous, internally contradictory forms of black working-class organization and mobilization has been reflected in the diverse perspectives captured in this volume. Collectively, they represent vital efforts to reconstruct, resituate, and expand narratives of black working-class institution-building, community formation, and politics beyond the narrow lenses of both white-dominated trade unionism and middle-class–dominated black civil rights activism.
We hope that this volume engages a wide variety of scholars, especially those outside history proper. In the interdisciplinary field of Black Freedom Studies, a cohort of scholars including Timothy Tyson (1999), Simon Hall (2005), Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (2003), Robert Self (2003), and Thomas Sugrue (2008), has sought to dramatically rethink the composition of leaders and participants, periodization schema, and regional foci identified with African American social movements in the twentieth century. Theorizing a “long” civil rights movement encompassing working-class leadership as well as middle-class stewardship, female domestic workers as well as black male clergy, the 1930s and 1970s as well as the 1950s and 1960s, grassroots local movements in the Northeast, Midwest, and the Pacific West, as well as in the South, and Cold War international as well as U.S. domestic landscapes, these historians and social scientists have challenged definitions of civil rights struggles as being concerned only with public accommodations, de jure discrimination, and the vote below the Mason-Dixon line during the decade between the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954 and the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the process, they have sparked timely debates and conflicting interpretations about the meanings, goals, and legacies of “black freedom struggles”—a flexible term simultaneously enveloping and surpassing a range of legislative reforms typically associated with the “classical” 1954–1965 period of modern civil rights activism.
From a “long” perspective, the sheer length of Randolph’s public career also makes him a handy symbol of a movement that spanned the length of the twentieth century. At the same time, scholars such as Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang (2007) and Steven Lawson (2011) have strongly cautioned against overstating the continuity of this timeline of struggle. For