Volume 37, Number 18 · November 22, 1990
Keeping the Faith
By Darryl Pinckney
Tearing Down the Color Bar: A Documentary History of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
by Joseph F. Wilson
Columbia University Press, 396 pp., $45.00
A. Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement
by Paula F. Pfeffer
Louisiana State University Press, 336 pp., $22.95
A. Philip Randolph took over the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925 and made it into an organization of historical importance far beyond its numbers. Randolph turned a labor union into a freedom movement, and during its twelve-year battle with the Pullman Company to become the first black union recognized by a major US corporation, he helped to transform attitudes among blacks toward unions, toward themselves as workers, and to end organized labor's antagonism toward black workers. If Du Bois was the heir of the abolitionists, then Randolph was the successor of the Reconstruction radicals: he was almost alone among black leaders of his time in thinking of the racial struggle as based on the economic needs of blacks. He chose not to identify with the middle-class cultural aspirations of the New Negro, but he also offered blacks more than the ephemeral comforts of Marcus Garvey, whose glorification of separatism he actively opposed. Randolph's mission was 'to bring the gospel of unionism into the colored world.'
Review, 6272 words
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