At one time, Asa Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was a household name. As president of the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), he was an embodiment of America's multifaceted radical tradition, a leading spokesman for Black America, and a potent symbol of trade unionism and civil rights agitation for nearly half a century. But with the dissolution of the BSCP in the 1970s, the assaults waged against organized labor in the 1980s, and the overall silencing of labor history in U.S. popular discourse, he has been largely forgotten among large segments of the general public before whom he once loomed so large. Historians, however, have not only continued to focus on Randolph himself, but his role (either direct, or via his legacy) in a wide range of social, political, cultural, and even religious milieu and movements. The authors of Reframing Randolph have taken Randolph's dusty portrait down from the wall to reexamine and reframe it, allowing scholars to regard him in new, and often competing, lights. This collection of essays gathers, for the very first time, many genres of perspectives on Randolph. Featuring both established and emergent intellectual voices, this project seeks to avoid both hagiography and blanket condemnation alike. The contributors represent the diverse ways that historians have approached the importance of his long and complex career in the main political, social, and cultural currents of twentieth-century African American specifically, and twentieth-century U.S. history overall. The central goal of Reframing Randolph is to achieve a combination of synthetic and critical reappraisal.
Contents Foreword ix Arlene Holt Baker 1 A Reintroduction to Asa Philip Randolph 1 Andrew E. Kersten and Clarence Lang 2 Researching Randolph: Shifting Historiographic Perspectives 21 Joe William Trotter, Jr. 3 A. Philip Randolph: Emerging Socialist Radical 45 Eric Arnesen 4 Keeping His Faith: A. Philip Randolph's Working-Class Religion 77 Cynthia Taylor 5 Brotherhood Men and Singing Slackers: A. Philip Randolph's Rhetoric of Music and Manhood 101 Robert Hawkins 6 "The Spirit and Strategy of the United Front": Randolph and the National Negro Congress, 1936-1940 129 Erik S. Gellman 7 Organizing Gender: A. Philip Randolph and Women Activists 163 Melinda Chateauvert 8 Beyond A. Philip Randolph: Grassroots Protest and the March on Washington Movement 195 David Lucander 9 The "Void at the Center of the Story": The Negro American Labor Council and the Long Civil Rights Movement 223 William P. Jones 10 No Exit: A. Philip Randolph and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis 245 Jerald Podair Select Bibliography 271 About the Contributors 275 Index 279
