Remembering black labor leader on Black History Month

Bill Knight column for Thurs., Fri., or Sat., Feb. 1, 2 or 3, 2018

This week begins Black History Month, when labor may once more appreciate its role in the Civil Rights Movement but also realize that the best strategy for social change has for decades been coalition building, and one of the most effective people at this approach was African-American union leader A. Philip Randolph.

Randolph used his personal interests and skills – baseball, singing and acting, oratory – to reach African-Americans suspicious of organized labor, employers resistant to negotiating with workers, labor reluctant to embrace African-American unionists, and government hesitant to change racist policies. He bridged the arts and politics, social justice and workplace fairness, and became a leader who crossed class, race and geographic lines. 

It took decades of Randolph’s persistence before the alliance between labor and American Americans became a natural, mutually beneficial relationship.

The roots of such cooperation might be traced to Sojourner Truth, the escaped slave who in the 1800s worked not only for the abolition of slavery but women’s rights, pacifism, prison reform, religious tolerance, and the elimination of the death penalty.

Randolph was born in segregated Florida, son of a minister and seamstress, and as a youth was an accomplished athlete and actor.

Influenced by the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, he moved to New York City in 1911. There, he organized a New York elevator-operators union, served as president of the National Brotherhood of Workers of America (representing African-American dockworkers) from 1919-1921, organized Virginia shipyard and dockworkers, and co-founded the radical monthly magazine The Messenger, which editorialized against lynching and the U.S. involvement in World War I, and for collective action and racial integration.

An enthusiastic proponent for government action to guarantee equal protection under the Constitution, Randolph became nationally prominent in the 1920s when he led the first serious effort to unionize workers at the Pullman railroad company and helped launch the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), the first influential union of African-Americans.

Hundreds of railroad porters met in Harlem in August 1925 to start organizing a union at the Pullman Company, which had resisted unionization by firing labor-friendly employees. To avoid this, workers picked Randolph – who didn’t work there – to lead the BSCP. To overcome some African-American reluctance to join a predominantly white labor movement, delegates adopted a slogan that expressed their situation: "Fight or Be Slaves.”

Focusing on major terminals such as Chicago and St. Louis, Randolph signed up about half of Pullman’s porters. The Railway Labor Act was passed in 1926 to set up arbitration and mediation to avoid disruptions, and in 1927, the BSPC asked the Interstate Commerce Commission to investigate porters' wages and other issues, but the ICC ruled that it had no jurisdiction. However, in 1934 President Roosevelt led the reform of the railway labor law to protect porters’ bargaining rights and the BSPC in 1935 won a representation election, becoming the exclusive bargaining agent for the porters, who ratified their first contract in 1937.

In the 1930s and ’40s, Randolph led the National Negro Congress, which supported mass demonstrations and nonviolent civil disobedience, and in 1950 he was key to forming the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which from the ’50s through 1962 coordinated legislative campaigns.

In later years, Randolph successfully pressured the government to ban racial discrimination in the defense industry (in the 1940s), became the AFL-CIO’s first African-American vice president and helped organize the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. (in the ’50s), and was chief organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, joined by union leaders such as United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther.

Speaking on the National Mall that August, Randolph said, “The plain and simple fact is that until we went into the streets the federal government was indifferent to our demands. It was not until the streets and jails of Birmingham were filled that Congress began to think about civil rights legislation. It was not until thousands demonstrated in the South that lunch counters and other public accommodations were integrated.”

A. Philip Randolph paved the way to bridge different movements, and Americans of all races can learn from his efforts.