Description
New York University Press Reframing Randolph Labor Black Freedom and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph 2015 Edition by Andrew E. Kersten, Clarence Lang
Atone time, Asa Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was a household name. As president ofthe all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), he was an embodimentof America's multifaceted radical tradition, a leading spokesman for BlackAmerica, and a potent symbol of trade unionism and civil rights agitation fornearly half a century. But with the dissolution of the BSCP in the 1970s, theassaults waged against organized labor in the 1980s, and the overall silencingof labor history in U.S. popular discourse, he has been largely forgotten amonglarge segments of the general public before whom he once loomed so large.Historians, however, have not only continued to focus on Randolph himself, buthis 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 fromthe wall to reexamine and reframe it, allowing scholars to regard him in new,and often competing, lights. This collection of essays gathers, for the veryfirst time, many genres of perspectives on Randolph. Featuring both establishedand emergent intellectual voices, this project seeks to avoid both hagiographyand blanket condemnation alike. The contributors represent the diverse waysthat historians have approached the importance of his long and complex careerin the main political, social, and cultural currents of twentieth-centuryAfrican American specifically, and twentieth-century U.S. history overall. Thecentral goal of Reframing Randolph isto achieve a combination of synthetic and critical reappraisal. Table of contents :- 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