Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph
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.

1119220550
Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph
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.

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Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph

Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph

by Andrew E. Kersten, Clarence Lang
Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph

Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph

by Andrew E. Kersten, Clarence Lang

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Overview

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780814785942
Publisher: New York University Press
Publication date: 01/09/2015
Series: Culture, Labor, History , #12
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Andrew Kersten is Dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of Idaho.

Clarence Lang is Associate Professor of African & African American Studies, and American Studies, at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75.

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

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