New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South by Claudrena Harold Bryant Simon Jane Dailey

Author:Claudrena Harold, Bryant Simon, Jane Dailey [Claudrena Harold, Bryant Simon, Jane Dailey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Politics, Civil Rights, Social Science, Cultural Studies, African-American Studies, History, Americas, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780820349848
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2016-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

FIVE

The South Will Be Invaded

The same year that Marcus Garvey commenced his five-year sentence for mail fraud at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Abram Harris published a thought-provoking article in which he lamented the rising racial consciousness in black America. “Conflicting race psychologies,” he argued, “vitiate any reapproachment between white and black workers and thus render impossible the unanimity of feeling and purpose necessary for independent working-class action in politics.” Harris challenged his forward-thinking peers to take the lead in curing the “black masses” of the “color psychosis” that had developed as a result of their involvement in “reactionary organizations” such as Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA): “If the Negro’s ever-increasing self-assertion is not guided by Negro intellectuals possessed of catholic vision, it will build within the present order a self-illuminating black world oblivious to things white.”1

Not everyone shared Harris’s perspective. Far less concerned with the growing assertions of race pride emanating from African Americans, Thomas L. Dabney, a close friend of Harris during their undergraduate years at Virginia Union University, put forth a different reading of the political landscape. Opposed to the idea that the black masses required intellectual guidance from above, Dabney denounced what he viewed as myopic and often inadequately researched representations of African Americans as insufficiently class-conscious. A keen observer of U.S. labor relations, Dabney had witnessed firsthand the unwavering devotion of hundreds of black workers to trade union politics even when such devotion failed to translate into meaningful improvement in their material circumstances. “That Negro workers are amenable to the philosophy of trade unionism,” he opined, “is attested by the fact that more than 200,000 Negroes belong to trade unions.”2 To deepen his readers’ understanding of this important dimension of black working-class activism, Dabney devoted a great deal of his intellectual work to examining African Americans’ complex relationship to organized labor. Of the many unions he examined in his writings, few intrigued him more than A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). Organized in the summer of 1925, the Brotherhood focused on three important goals: improving the material conditions of porters and maids who worked for the Pullman Palace Company; gaining recognition as their representative body; and wiping out all vestiges of racial paternalism within and beyond the world of labor.3 Though media coverage of the Brotherhood focused primarily on its activities in New York and Chicago, the BSCP was no stranger to black southerners. As Dabney discovered during a 1928 research trip, “In far Southern cities like Knoxville, Tennessee, Jacksonville, Florida, and Atlanta, Georgia, prominent Negroes and rank and file porters spoke in high terms of the Brotherhood and Mr. Randolph.”4 Unwilling to stand on the sidelines as various leaders and intellectuals debated the most effective strategies to improve African Americans’ economic condition, BSCP followers in the South embraced the union’s political vision and its emphasis on the unionization of African American workers. In Norfolk, for example, Brotherhood members defended the BSCP’S unionization strategy as providing black Americans with “their only chance for economic emancipation.

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