Labor Day: Remembering a giant

Labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph

 Two recent events made me think of A. Philip Randolph, an underappreciated hero of the labor movement and the African American struggle for freedom, justice, and equality.

The first was close to home. In West Virginia, Aug. 26 is officially Katherine Johnson Day in honor of the brilliant African American mathematician whose story is featured in Margot Lee Shetterly’s 2016 book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race.” The book was made into a film of the same title that was nominated for Best Picture at the 89th Academy Awards.

Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in 1918. A mathematical prodigy, she attended what is now West Virginia State University, a historically Black college, at age 15, graduating at 18 with majors in math and French. She was one of a handful of students to integrate West Virginia University’s graduate school. 

In 1952 she joined the all Black Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NASA’s forerunner, which was headed by Dorothy Vaughan, a fellow West Virginian. She would eventually play a major role in doing the math that made the lunar landing and other space advances possible.

At age of 97, Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. She died earlier this year at the age of 101. Her obituary in the New York Times began with these words: “They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.”

The second event that reminded me of A. Philip Randolph was more somber. It was the Aug. 28 “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” March on Washington for racial justice and an end to police brutality. The march was held on the 57th anniversary of the original march best known for Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Neither of these events might have happened if not for the life and work of Randolph (1889-1979), an African American writer, editor, democratic socialist, union leader, and civil rights pioneer who made a huge mark on American history over several decades.

Born in Crescent City Florida, his father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and tailor and his mother was a homemaker and skilled seamstress. Both were fearless advocates for racial justice.

Randolph headed to New York as a young man, working and attending college classes. He loved theater, and founded a Shakespearean society in Harlem, where he played many of the leading roles. Always concerned with the rights of Black workers, he edited radical monthly periodical The Messenger beginning in 1917, which the Department of Justice referred to as "the most able and the most dangerous of all the Negro publications." Randolph himself was called “the most dangerous Negro in America.”

In 1925, Randolph became the founding president of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union representing Black workers on the luxury rail cars manufactured by the union-busting Pullman Company. The Brotherhood was the first Black-led union to be affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. Despite the name, the union also represented women who worked as maids on the rails.

It took a dozen years—and the help of New Deal labor legislation—but in 1937, the Brotherhood won major concessions from the company in what was probably the first major contract a white employer signed with a Black labor leader. 

The Brotherhood was instrumental in opening the path to a decent livelihood for tens of thousands of Black workers. It’s no accident that one of the leaders of the 1950s Montgomery bus boycott that propelled Dr. King to national prominence was Brotherhood member E.D. Nixon.

Randolph also opposed segregation in labor unions and eventually helped end it, serving as a vice president of the AFL-CIO.

He was as comfortable playing hardball with presidents as with corporations. As the nation ramped up production during World War II, Randolph threatened a march on Washington to protest discrimination in federal employment and companies receiving government contracts—a move that pushed the Roosevelt administration into issuing Executive Order 8802 in 1941, which barred hiring discrimination in defense industries and federal agencies and created the Fair Employment Practices Commission. 

This would eventually help open the doors of federal employment for Dorothy Vaughn, Katherine Johnson, and other brilliant “hidden figures” in the aeronautics and space industries.

After the war, Randolph founded the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation that went head to head against the Truman administration. The result was Executive Order 9981, which ended official discrimination in the U.S. military.

He was assisted in these efforts by Bayard Rustin, a brilliant Black organizer (and Quaker who worked with AFSC). When Rustin, a gay man, was attacked for his sexual orientation by U.S. senator and segregationist Strom Thurmond and others, Randolph responded by expressing complete confidence in Rustin, saying “I am dismayed that there are in this country men who, wrapping themselves in the mantle of Christian morality, would mutilate the most elementary conceptions of human decency, privacy and humility in order to attack other men.”

Rustin would later say of him that “no one has stood beside me in times of trial the way Mr. Randolph has. He is the only man I know who has never said an unkind word about anyone, or who refuses to listen to an unkind word about anyone, even though it may be true.”

Randolph and Rustin’s greatest effort was organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which featured speeches and performances by Dr. King, the late Congressman John Lewis, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, West Virginia-born labor leader Walter Reuther, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, singers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, and many others.

Randolph himself spoke as well, saying that “we know that we have no future in a society in which 6 million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty.”

That march inspired generations of Americans, including those who marched this summer.

This is only a partial list of the accomplishments of an amazing life. This Labor Day, I’ll remember many of those who fought for workers’ rights, but Randolph holds a special place for me. 

In the words of his beloved Hamlet, “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”

(This ran as a post in the AFSC blog and ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail in a slightly different form.)

Another big day in history

W.E.B. DuBois, 1868-1963

Today, August 15, is another big day in West Virginia and US history. It marks the first public meeting of the Niagara Movement in Harpers Ferry. That civil rights organization would eventually launch the NAACP.

 W.E.B. DuBois, one of the leaders, led a barefoot march to the engine house where radical abolitionist John Brown was captured during his 1859 raid. On the scene, he said that "here on the scene of John Brown’s martyrdom we reconsecrate ourselves, our honor, our property to the final emancipation of the race which John Brown died to make free."

J.R. Clifford, 1848-1933

Also in attendance that day was West Virginia's own J.R. Clifford, the state's first African-American attorney. A major civil rights leader in his own right, Clifford was also a teacher, principal, journalist and Civil War veteran. In 1898 he won a landmark case establishing education as a basic civil right, arguing that ‘‘discrimination against people because of color alone as to privileges, immunities and equal protection of the law is unconstitutional.’’

Bad week for…. everything

With the impending Supreme Court nomination that is sure to be gut-wrenchingly, mind-numblingly terrible, and the recent torrent of anti-human Supreme Court rulings, like their decisions on racist gerrymandering in Texas, the indefensible upholding of Trump’s travel ban,  and Janus v. AFSCME, New York Times editorial board (fake news!) gives some pithy advice that any hope for man and womankind in America is at the ballot box.

In unrelated news, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will be visiting our fair Capitol city next month to hear testimony about the myriad of collateral consequences facing people when they leave prison.  Topics will include barriers to employment including restrictions on professional licenses, and severely limited access to public benefits like housing assistance and SNAP.  Talk about things (like food, a place to live, steady income) that can easily be taken for granted….

Another even less appreciated problem for people when they leave prison is bad teeth, in part because of limited dental services in prison and also pre-incarceration, a likelihood of being among the 74 million Americans who lack dental coverage.

Dark days for sure, so feel free to just watch this slightly dated video from John Oliver's all-dog supreme court.  

Taken for Granted

I just finished listening to an unabridged biography of general and President Ulysses Grant titled The Man Who Saved The Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace and I've come away with a renewed appreciation of Grant as president. As a lifelong Civil War dork, I was quite familiar with his achievements in the war but not so much with what came later.

This isn't something a lot of us learned in schools, where Grant's presidency, if addressed at all, is often remembered for this or that scandal. But on the most important issues of his day, defending the rights of former slaves and humane treatment of the American Indians, he was head and shoulders above his contemporaries. There is something remarkable about his unshakable character, both in war and peace. (He even relied on Quakers to help implement his efforts to promote peace with Native Americans, something I missed despite 20+ years of working for AFSC.)

I must have missed this too, but apparently conservatives have recently made an effort to take Grant's face off the $50 bill and replace it with Ronald Reagan (!). While the spirit of fairness compels me to admit that the Gipper may have had his moments,  I can't imagine bumping the savior of the Union in favor of the buster of a union. Here's  a great op-ed in defense of Grant by Sean Wilentz. And here's a sample paragraph of the same about what may be behind the effort to dump grant:

In reality, what fueled the personal defamation of Grant was contempt for his Reconstruction policies, which supposedly sacrificed a prostrate South, as one critic put it, "on the altar of Radicalism." That he accomplished as much for the freed slaves as he did within the constitutional limits of the presidency was remarkable. Without question, his was the most impressive record on civil rights and equality of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson.

There is also something heroic about his last battle, against lung cancer and time, when, with the help of Samuel Clemens, he discovered his gift for writing as he completed his memoirs in an effort to provide for his family.

If you get the chance, try to learn a little more about this decent but unassuming person. I hope Grant once again assumes his rightful place in the American pantheon. And stays on the $50.

THEY SHOOK THEIR GROOVE THING. I'm referring to stubby tailed feathered dinosaurs, of course.

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