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.