Car Porters (BSCP) emerged as the most prominent symbol of the organized black labor movement during the twentieth century. Under the leadership of the civil rights, social justice, and labor activist Asa Philip Randolph, the BSCP organized black porters and maids at the Chicago-based Pullman Company, the largest single employer of blacks in the nation. Adopting the motto “Service not Servitude,” the organization not only pushed for wage increases and better working conditions and treatment for black porters, but also linked the porters’ struggle to the predominantly white labor movement and to the larger struggle of the African American community to demolish the segregationist order. In so doing, Randolph and the BSCP helped to transform the American labor movement and set the stage for the abolition of the Jim Crow system.
Beginning during World War II, Randolph’s militant March on Washington Movement to desegregate defense industry jobs and the U.S. armed forces culminated in the historic gathering of some 250,000 people on the mall of the nation’s capital in 1963. While a new leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., took center stage on that August day over fifty years ago, he and the entire modern black freedom movement stood squarely on the shoulders of Randolph and the BSCP. Because of Randolph’s stature and influence within both the labor and the civil rights movements, it is easy to regard the history of his struggles to advance the interests of black people without any dissent or disapproval. Yet despite his accomplishments and widely acknowledged charisma, Randolph was nonetheless what some scholars have described as “a polarizing figure” within twentieth century U. S. social movements. In their book The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (1931), economists Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris offered one of the earliest scholarly critiques of Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Spero and Harris sharply rebuked Randolph for what they saw as insensitivities and blind spots regarding the religious culture and community life of black workers, the magnitude of white workers’ racial hostility toward their African American counterparts, and the efficacy of publicity over day-to-day organizing in advancing the cause of Pullman porters.1 Reviewing the development of scholarship since Spero and Harris’s early and influential assessment, this essay explores shifting theoretical and methodological perspectives, sources, and arguments about Randolph and the BSCP over time, with an emphasis on the impact of Randolph’s leadership and political philosophy on the BSCP, the American labor movement, the African American community, and the larger fight for social justice.
Studies by Sterling D. Spero, Abram L. Harris, Brailsford R. Brazeal, Herbert Garfinkel, and others launched the first generation of scholarship on Randolph and the BSCP. The Black Worker established the initial conceptual and methodological model for research and writing on Randolph and the porters.2 Drawing heavily upon the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Messenger, as well as published agreements between Pullman and the BSCP, Spero and Harris developed a dialectical perspective on the racial paternalism of the Pullman Company; accented the limits of economic radicalism; and treated Randolph’s emphasis on publicity campaigns as a problem rather than a virtue in organizing the porters’ union.
Spero and Harris clearly delineated the dual nature of the relationship that prevailed between black workers and the Pullman Company. Formed in the early aftermath of emancipation in 1867, the Pullman Company offered black workers, mostly ex-slaves, one of their earliest alternatives to employment in the land, where a hostile southern elite was determined to reclaim full authority over the labor of black people. Almost from the outset, the porter’s job became “practically a Negro monopoly.” Despite the job’s connection to enslavement and “servility” in the minds of Pullman and the traveling white public, it provided higher wages and better working conditions than most work open to southern black men until the onset of World War I, the Great Migration, and the expansion of job opportunities in mass production firms.3
Spero and Harris also outlined a broad litany of African American complaints against the Pullman Company. The Black Worker underscored the porters’ painful and ongoing struggles with low wages, dependence on tips, long hours, and uncompensated work; performance of conductor’s work at porter’s pay; collateral occupational expenses that came out of their own pockets (uniforms, shoe polish, food, etc.); and lack of adequate time for rest or sleep during long runs. Even so, Spero and Harris concluded that such grievances were insufficient for most porters to join Randolph, build a strong union, and challenge Pullman to increase wages and improve working conditions and on-the-job treatment. “The porter’s contact with the well-to-do traveling public led him to absorb its point of view and to seek to emulate its standards. . . . It gave him a thrill to have bankers and captains of industry ride in his car. . . . It made him feel like a captain of industry himself, even if it did not make him affluent or ease the burden of his work. Even a vicarious captain of industry is rather poor trade-union material.” Moreover, in their view, Randolph’s economic radicalism blinded him to three interrelated facets of early twentieth- century black life that undercut his organizing effectiveness: “(1) the Negro’s orthodox religious traditions; (2) the growing prevalence of Negro middle-class ideology [as reflected in the politics of the black press, elected officials, and ministers of leading black churches]; and (3) racial antagonism between white and black workers.” Equally important, according to The Black Worker, Randolph overemphasized the utility of publicity and neglected long-range planning and the day-to-day work of the BSCP. “If it were his purpose to win recognition from the Pullman Company too much publicity was likely to strengthen the company’s determination not to yield, because yielding in the glare of publicity would be a double defeat.” Spero and Harris forcefully argued that a “less theatrical program” of labor organizing might not have “made the front pages” of the news, but would have “invited less company opposition and . . . less risk of ruin.” Randolph and the BSCP exhibited the capacity to “initiate movements but lacked the power of sustaining them. . . . This was their undoing.” Accordingly, The Black Worker portrayed Randolph as a leader largely out of touch with black workers. In their analysis of the BSCP’s aborted strike action of 1928, for example, Spero and Harris argued that Randolph moved ahead with the strike “without first finding out how the men really felt about a genuine strike.”4
Spero and Harris set the mold for subsequent studies on Randolph and the Brotherhood. From World War II to the postwar period, inquiries addressed the repulsive as well as the attractive features of African American employment for the Pullman Company; the limits of labor radicalism within the context of a white supremacist socioeconomic and political regime; and the challenges of BSCP media efforts to generate sympathy for the cause of black workers. Based on the changes wrought by the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar years, this research also challenged key interpretations of The Black Worker, advanced before the significant breakthroughs of the New Deal era. Economic historian Brailsford R. Brazeal analyzed with approval Randolph’s use of “propaganda” as a tried and tested technique in the larger organized American labor movement. Publicity and education (particularly the sponsorship of labor institutes and “Negro” labor conferences) generated endorsements from organized white labor (including the railroad brotherhoods and the American Federation of Labor) and gained increasing support from diverse African American community organizations and groups, including the black press, churches, fraternal orders, public office holders, civil rights and social service organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League. Moreover, in Brazeal’s hands, rather than neglecting the religious culture of black workers, Randolph’s upbringing in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Jacksonville, Florida, shaped his appeal to porters in religious terms. “To have the porters build a union as they had helped members of their racial group build powerful churches was the motive behind Randolph’s use of religious appeal and terminology,” Brazeal wrote. “‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free’ was the heading for most of the bulletins sent out by national headquarters of the Brotherhood and is now used on the cover page of the Brotherhood’s publication, The Black Worker.”5
Brazeal rejected Spero and Harris’s negative assessment of Randolph’s leadership and the BSCP’s potential to achieve its goals. Despite the dire straits confronting the Brotherhood
