Reframing Randolph by Andrew E. Kersten

Author:Andrew E. Kersten
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780814764640
Publisher: NYU Press

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Historians have often treated A. Philip Randolph as the moral compass of the black freedom struggle and union movement in America. As marched Randolph, these studies imply, so marched the movement. Thus, few historians have considered what the NNC accomplished after Randolph departed from the organization in April 1940; they assigned it to the dustbin of history and dismissed it, in Cold War terminology, as a “Communist Front” organization. Moreover, even studies of Randolph during his reign as president of the NNC tend to focus on the successes of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters over the exponentially more significant organization of black workers into major industrial unions in the CIO.62

Taking into account Randolph’s symbolic importance, charismatic leadership, and practical work on behalf of the NNC movement in the late 1930s changes the perspective on him as “Mr. Black Labor,” making Randolph not necessarily the only leader worth highlighting, and even destabilizing the assumption that his leadership consistently represented the vanguard of the movement for economic security and civil rights among African Americans. Rather than demeaning Randolph, this approach complicates him as a civil rights spokesman, making him all the more human and the history of his leadership all the more instructive. Focusing on the period from 1935 to 1940, this chapter shows that Randolph subsumed his feelings about working in a coalition that included Communists for a few short years, and it explains why he abruptly changed direction by interrogating his larger vision for the labor movement as a vehicle for civil rights. His decisions—both in terms of the AFL and backroom conferences with the Roosevelt administration—reveal that he was in equal parts strategically cautious and militant.

This historical framing also helps to explain why Shelton Tappes, a fellow trade unionist and NNC leader in Detroit, espoused such a critical perspective on Randolph. In a 1967 interview with NAACP labor secretary Herbert Hill, Tappes stated that Randolph’s “appeal has always been more to the white-collar class than to the working class.” He continued:

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