A. Philip Randolph??1889-1979
BROOKS, THOMASR.
BRINGING BLACKS INTO THE MAINSTREAM A, Philip Randolph 18894979 BY THOMAS R. BROOKS When A. Philip Randolph, who died last May 16 at age 90, was a boy, he witnessed a near lynching. It was...
...Meany, who had pointedly ignored the organization, appeared at its third convention banquet...
...In fact, he came to trade unionism as a Socialist intellectual, not as a worker organized by craft or industry...
...He had explained his feelings in a 1919 editorial: "The dissolution of the American Federation of Labor would inure to the benefit of the labor movement in this country in particular and the international labor movement in general...
...That may seem the ultimate in incongruity as a testimonial to this most resolute of battlers for democracy, one who suffered so much and achieved so much while promoting a massive moral revolution in a nation for all their constituents—perhaps the most telling measure of Randolph's accomplishments...
...Randolph was keenly aware that they needed jobs, and unionization, if the United States was to become a truly democratic, integrated society...
...Randolph's triumph paralleled that of Mahatma M. K. Gandhi in India, and it stemmed from the same ability to prevail by dint of an unshakeable combination of gentleness and conviction over the entrenched forces of obstructionism...
...It was forestalled by his father, pastor of a small church in Jacksonville, Florida, who called out his male parishoners for a night-long vigil in front of the county jail to piotect the black prisoner being thiejtened by hostile whites...
...Two blacks are on the AFL-CIO Executive Council, and a growing number of national unions-such as Steel, the Laborers, Retail Clerks, Transport Workers, the Newspaper Guild, Teachers, Auto—have black vice presidents and other top elected officers...
...A. Philip Randolph was a major black spokesman, a civil rights leader...
...Everybody wants to get into Harvard, Yale and Princeton where the same prejudice is...
...I believe that unity is more important than industrial unionism...
...More important, the Federation set up a Special Task Force on Civil Rights, and it decided to devote a day at the 1963 AFL-CIO convention in New York to dealing with discrimination in the labor movement...
...That opened the way for further advances, both inside and outside the labor movement...
...He thus hoped to force an immediate end to exclusionary practices, especially discrimination in union-controlled apprenticeships, and to bring about the reorganization of the Federation's Civil Rights Department plus the election of blacks to positions of responsibility...
...From that experience, Randolph said later, he learned the value of organization and developed the conviction that blacks could defend themselves...
...They didn't pass our resolutions, but we brought them religion...
...Webster added: "You can get an eight-column write-up any day about the prejudice of the American Federation of Labor...
...I covered the organization's development and two of its conventions for Commonweal and The Reporter...
...Whatever (a man] is, if he is a worker and he is not making at least $2.00 an hour, then he is the brother that we need to go with...
...At least 10 major unions—including Auto, Steel, State, County and Municipal Employees, the garment unions, Laborers, Teachers—are 20 per cent or better black...
...But not before he had won significant concessions from the AFL-CIO leadership...
...In part, this reflected the fact that three-quarters of the country's then 12.9 million blacks (less than 10 per cent of the total population) still lived in the deep, nonunion South...
...In 1959, Randolph decided the time had come for a decisive push on the issue of discrimination within the unions...
...Randolph called the Federation's new secretary-treasurer, George Meany, who went to the hotel manager and told him, "These two gentlemen are here as members of the American Federation of Labor...
...Nevertheless, Randolph was to link up with the AFL and remain loyal to it —and its successor, the AFL-CIO—for half-a-century...
...It stands for pure and simple unionism as against industrial unionism...
...It provided, as well, part of the underpinning for the 1963 March on Washington?which, it should be remembered, was a march for jobs and civil rights...
...Ultimately, Randolph had difficulty sustaining the NALC and it broke up...
...Randolph was for unions, of course, but he did not much care for the American Federation of Labor (AFL...
...If Randolph was not discouraged, that was because he also knew the levers that could move our society and when to apply the appropriate pressure...
...Where local unions have a sizeable black membership, representation in terms of elected officers is very good indeed...
...Others in the NALC wanted an all-out attack on the AFL-CIO...
...On June 25, 1941, he issued his famed Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in defense industries and in the government...
...That they—and eventually the labor movement as a whole —responded to his call is to his lasting credit, and is our gain...
...Nobody says we should not participate in these things because there's prejudice there...
...To this end, he established the Negro American Labor Council (NALC...
...He was a man of labor, dedicated to his union of Pullman Car porters, of whom, he once said, "Without the porters I couldn't have carried on the fight for fair employment, or the fight against discrimination in the Armed Forces...
...Thomas R. Brooks, a veteran labor writer, is the author o/Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor and Clint, a biography of ClintonS...
...Under the direction of Bayard Rustin and Norman Hill the Institute has done a remarkable job with voter registration among blacks, and with leadership training of black aspirants/holders of trade union elective and staff posts...
...Yet the vigor of his lifelong fight for black freedom and the firmness of his belief in human equality were rooted in incandescent personal qualities that made him unique in a movement where even the most elementary civility was usually a stranger...
...Labor was in short supply, black workers were an untapped resource, and race discrimination would be an increasing embarrassment to a nation engaged in defending democracy against the arch-racist, Adolf Hitler...
...It was a difficult decision, for Lewis had supported Randolph's struggle against discrimination in the Federation and the departing unions were organizing black workers in the mass production industries...
...Blacks were starting to move off the land into the cities, however, and from the South to the North...
...Golden...
...Actually, there were real problems...
...That is one reason why the Brotherhood stayed with the AFL when John L. Lewis invited it to walk out and join the Committee for Industrial Organization, later the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO...
...But Randolph was concerned about labor unity...
...The consequent growth of real black power in the unions underlay Randolph's successful 1959-63 struggle within the merged AFL-CIO for a more aggressive antidiscrimination policy...
...It is a far cry from that day when Randolph would stand alone on the floor of the AFL convention to decry race discrimination within the labor movement...
...We gave them hell every year," he told Jervis Anderson...
...They are going to attend our convention and stay in the Rice Hotel, or else the convention is pulling out of the Rice Hotel, beginning about two minutes from now...
...suckled on bigotry and racial oppression...
...Milton P. Webster, first vice president of the union, responded: "That is all tom-myrot, because [AFL President William) Green does not need the Brotherhood and there wouldn't be anything accomplished by selling out to Green...
...In America, if we should stay out of everything that's prejudiced we wouldn't be in anything...
...It claimed a membership of 10,000 and had active chapters in New York City, Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh...
...Randolph's biographer, Jervis Anderson, summed up the thinking on affiliation: "The Brotherhood in the AFL would no longer be a lonely collection of black porters crying forlornly in the wilderness of American corporate power, but, rather, a union that was part of the organized labor movement, and, therefore, entitled to its moral and political backings...
...Arriving as delegates to the 1940 AFL convention in Houston, Texas, Randolph and Webster could not get into the hotel...
...According to a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics study, black workers account for over 14 per cent of all union members, a somewhat higher proportion than their 11.2 per cent representation in the total work force, and one in five new trade union members is black...
...The present American Federation of Labor is the most wicked machine for the propagation of race prejudice in the country...
...White unionists greeted the NALC with hostility, charging that it was a dual union, a power caucus and less complimentary things...
...When in 1925 a group of Pullman Car porters asked him to help them form a union, he was editor of the Messenger, a prestigious black Socialist publication then in decline after a decade of success...
...What surely must have been one of the high points of Randolph's life came on that day—not when he received an undoubtedly heartwarming standing ovation, but later in the discussion when a Plumbers' Union delegate from Texas, a member of labor's conservative wing, cried out: "We will take our stand with the Negro, with the Latin American, or 10 years hence we'll not stand at all in our state, I don't know about yours...
...The choice is yours...
...Even the unions organized without regard to race did not have very many blacks...
...In labor, as in the country at large, there is no longer a single spokesman for blacks...
...Randolph's objective was to build pressure on the AFL-CIO...
...There is less black representation at the national union level, but this is changing rapidly...
...Blacks poured into the defense industries and went on to become an important component of the postwar industrial work force...
...Now, what do you say...
...Racial progress, though, was painfully slow...
...It holds that there can be a partnership between labor and capital...
...After a show of resistance, necessary to the politics of the day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt conceded...
...When the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters affiliated with the Federation in 1929, the Communists accused Randolph of a "sellout...
...You will find in the universities and schools of the nation the same prejudice that you find in the AFL...
...Thespeech-es he delivered on those occasions were noted for their eloquence, but even A. H. Raskin, for many years the chief labor correspondent of the New York Times, is currently associate director of the National News Council...
...Randolph's death marked the end of an era...
...More blacks belong to unions today than to any other nonreligious organization...
...Through the 1930s and most of the 1940s, he would appear year after frustrating year at the annual conventions cf the old American Federation of Labor to plead fruitlessly for a more energetic policy of organizing black workers and for a shutting of the Federation's own doors to unions that shut out blacks as members...
...His experience in organizing the porters taught him that the future of black workers in America lay within the mainstream of the labor movement...
...Outside the immediate confines of the labor movement, Randolph also inspired the Workers' Defense League's eminently practical project designed to help young blacks enter various skilled trades...
...On coming North to Harlem as a young man, Randolph sought to implement the lesson in various ways—by organizing his fellow workers on odd jobs held as he worked his way through City College nights, by establishing an employment/job training agency, and through the Socialist Party...
...In 1940, the prospects for racial progress in the AFL were limited, but the country was preparing for defense...
...With this in mind, Randolph threatened a march on Washington—first of 10,000 then of 100,000 blacks—for jobs and against discrimination...
...Meany carried the day, yet he has himself pointed out repeatedly that at the time, "there were 23 national unions of the AFL that had a color bar in their constitutions...
...Now functioning independently as the Recruitment Training Program, it has scored many breakthroughs in minority apprenticeships, notably among structural iron workers (20 per cent), steamfitters and pipefitters (36.2 per cent), sheetmetal workers (18.5 per cent) and operating engineers (33 per cent...
...It is organized upon unsound principles...
...As he said, in speaking against the AFL expulsion of the industrial unions: "I believe that unity is more important than craft unionism...
...The A. Philip Randolph Institute similarly owes its inspiration to its namesake...
...While some unions have black caucuses, black officers speak Philip Randolph brought nobility to the American labor movement...
...still others plumped for the organization of black unions...
...Most of these highly paid trades were lily-white only a decade ago .Overall in the building trades, 19.4 per cent of the new apprentices and 9.4 per cent of the journeymen are currently non-whites...
...He was equally aware of his weakness in the labor movement...
...But like Anteus he had to touch ground...
Vol. 62 • June 1979 • No. 12
