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"Randolph, A. Philip 1889-1979."
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A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights
A. Philip Randolph's career as a trade unionist and civil rights activist fundamentally shaped the course of black protest in the mid-twentieth century. Standing alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and others at the center of the cultural renaissance and political radicalism that shaped communities such as Harlem in the 1920s and into the 1930s, Randolph fashioned an understanding of social justice that reflected a deep awareness of how race complicated class concerns, especially among black laborers. Examining Randolph's work in lobbying for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatening to lead a march on Washington in 1941, and establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee, Cornelius L. Bynum shows that Randolph's push for African American equality took place within a broader progressive program of industrial reform. Some of Randolph's pioneering plans for engineering change--which served as foundational strategies in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s--included direct mass action, nonviolent civil disobedience, and purposeful coalitions between black and white workers. Bynum interweaves biographical information on Randolph with details on how he gradually shifted his thinking about race and class, full citizenship rights, industrial organization, trade unionism, and civil rights protest throughout his activist career.
eBook
Hand in hand : ten Black men who changed America
This book presents the stories of 10 men from different eras in American history, organized chronologically to provide a scope from slavery to the modern day.
BOOK
Winning the War for Democracy
Scholars regard the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) as a forerunner of the postwar Civil Rights movement. Led by the charismatic A. Philip Randolph, MOWM scored an early victory when it forced the Roosevelt Administration to issue a landmark executive order that prohibited defense contractors from practicing racial discrimination. Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946 recalls that triumph, but also looks beyond Randolph and the MOWM's national leadership to focus on the organization's evolution and actions at the local level. Using the personal papers of previously unheralded MOWM members such as T.D. McNeal, internal government documents from the Roosevelt administration, and other primary sources, David Lucander highlights how local affiliates fighting for a double victory against fascism and racism helped the national MOWM accrue the political capital it needed to effect change. Lucander details the efforts of grassroots organizers to implement MOWM's program of empowering African Americans via meetings and marches at defense plants and government buildings and, in particular, focuses on the contributions of women activists like Layle Lane, E. Pauline Myers, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Throughout he shows how local activities often diverged from policies laid out at MOWM's national office, and how grassroots participants on both sides ignored the rivalry between Randolph and the leadership of the NAACP to align with one-another on the ground.
eBook
We Are Not Copyists
In 1952, A. Philip Randolph, the head of America’s largest black union and a prominent civil rights campaigner, traveled to Japan and Burma funded by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. In Asia, he encountered socialists and trade unionists struggling to negotiate the fractious divides between communism and capitalism within postwar states. In Burma, in particular, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and powerful Asian neighbors used propaganda, aid missions, and subsidized travel to offer competing visions of development while accusing each other of new forms of imperialism and foreign interference. In such an environment, a battle for hearts and minds within Asian labor movements constituted the front lines of the early years of the Cold War. Randolph’s journey shows us how Asian socialists and trade unionists responded to powerful foreign interests by articulating an early sense of non-alignment, forged in part through emerging Asian socialist networks, well before this was an official strategy. The Asian actors with whom Randolph interacted in Japan and Burma mirrored his own struggles as a socialist, a trade unionist, and a “railway man” while furthering his campaign for civil rights at home. This article uses Randolph’s journey to examine parallels and divergences between African-American and Asian socialists and trade unionists during the early Cold War, an age characterized by deepening splits in the politics of the Left.
Journal Article
National Voter Registration Act - Statutory Interpretation - Election Law - Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute
Voter suppression is as American as apple pie. Between the 2012 and 2016 elections, for example, fourteen states enacted laws making it harder for citizens to vote. These laws affect minority voters with particular intensity. Last Term, in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, the Court upheld an Ohio law that could ultimately allow the state to remove from its voter rolls close to one million registered voters. While cast as a dry exercise in statutory interpretation, Husted is best understood through the lens of the nation's history of race-based voter suppression.
Journal Article
Civil Rights, World War II, and U.S. Public Opinion
Scholars of American politics often assume World War II liberalized white racial attitudes. This conjecture is generally premised on the existence of an ideological tension between a war against Nazism and the maintenance of white supremacy at home, particularly the Southern system of Jim Crow. A possible relationship between the war and civil rights was also suggested by a range of contemporaneous voices, including academics like Gunnar Myrdal and activists like Walter White and A. Philip Randolph. However, while intuitively plausible, this relationship is generally not well verified empirically. A common flaw is the lack of attention to public opinion polls from the 1940s. Using the best available survey evidence, I argue the war's impact on white racial attitudes is more limited than is often claimed. First, I demonstrate that for whites in the mass public, while there is some evidence of liberalization on issues of racial prejudice, this generally does not extend to policies addressing racial inequities. White opposition to federal anti-lynching legislation actually seems to have increased during the war. Second, there is some evidence of racial moderation among white veterans, relative to their counterparts who did not serve. White veterans were more supportive of anti-lynching legislation in the immediate postwar period, and they offered stronger support for black voting rights in the early 1960s. However, they were not distinguishable on many other issues, including measures of racial prejudice and attitudes toward segregation.
Journal Article
Invocation in the Age of Eisenhower
Nor would the new movement of evangelical Protestants he inspired, which emerged from the 1950s eager to build a broader coalition of Bible believers and exert greater influence over American life.3 For most Americans, evangelicals included, prayer has been above all a matter of private devotion—a way to talk to God and have him talk back, a way to find solace amid pain, comfort beyond despair.4 But to see prayer as strictly private and spiritual, or mere rote, is to miss out on one of the richest repositories of movement politics in the modern era. King's message, delivered with a relentlessness that left his listeners entranced, signaled his emergence as the “new voice” of the civil rights movement.11 “Give us the ballot,” began his long list of political demands, “and we will fill our legislative halls with men of good will … we will quietly and non-violently, without rancor or bitterness, implement the Supreme Court decision of May seventeenth, 1954.” In the Cold War battle against the atheistic “red menace,” he had become something of a prayer warrior himself, determined to inject God in the nation's solemnest proceedings (his inaugural, for instance) and turn the new National Day of Prayer, passed by Congress in 1952, into a unifying political weapon.16 Those same intentions were evidenced at the Washington Mosque, where he assured his “Islamic friends” that their freedom of worship was safeguarded “under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts.” 18 See Wendy Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2008) and Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York, 2011).
Journal Article
The Black Church: A Tree with Many Branches
“The Black Church” is a popular phrase, often uttered with little consideration of the historical dissonances that make up Black Christianity. Despite the ways Black Christianity has shared in the common aim of dignity, humanity, and freedom asserted throughout the broader history of Black religion, there has never been one monolithic Black Church. However, when viewed as a “tree with many branches,” to borrow Christopher Small’s terminology for describing the tradition of Black music making, the Black Church represents a tradition with multiple performance practices and politics that have changed throughout history. Today, many young Black activists have turned to the Black church for political support only to find most clergy unwilling to make the kind of bold gestures of resistance seen in the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Also, younger Black activists have found the current church particularly hostile toward queer identities. The church they face, however, is not the sum total of the Black Church as a tradition. This essay is a mediation in and meditation on the Black Church’s interaction with contemporary Black activism and the tradition of Black working-class church activism as a “usable past,” a spiritual resource for the current crossroads in Black citizenship. I speak of Black working-class churches as a descriptive frame rather than in the exclusively demographic sense. Black working-class communities brought Black labor activism into churches, but further investigation is needed to adequately describe the membership of congregations discussed here. As an alternative to traditional Black Church historiography, viewing some of the connections among class, culture, and queerness can reveal how Black spirituality thrives beyond the view of the church from the top down, but it also demonstrates how and why this version of the Black church had to be sacrificed in the onslaught of neoliberalism.
Journal Article
\It Is Time for Artists to Be Heard\: Artists and Writers for Freedom, 1963–1964
In The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, James Smethurst writes: \"Black arts cultural nationalism draws on a long history.\" He describes the cultural nationalist stance we associate with the Black Arts Movement as involving a concept of liberation and self-determination that \"entails some notion of the development or recovery of a true 'national' culture that is linked to an already existing folk or popular culture\" and often relying on recognizable African elements. Black arts cultural nationalism expressed the linkages between Black Arts and Black Power even before they were specifically named and identified. By the mid-1950s, several historical shifts created new obstacles and new possibilities for left-wing Black artists and writers. The left-supported Black arts organizations like CNA disbanded in the face of anticommunist scrutiny and blacklisting, as did public left-wing alternative formations associated with the third-party political challenge in the 1940s.
Journal Article