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  • Image and Labor in a Longer, Broader Civil Rights Movement
  • Kate Sampsell-Willmann (bio)
Cornelius L. Bynum. A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. x + 244 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $75.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper).
Leigh Raiford. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 293 pp. Photos, bibliography, notes, and index. $45.00.

In the last decade, scholars have reconsidered the temporal span of the African American Civil Rights Movement (CRM): taken together, which moments of heroism and conscience are to be included in the “modern” CRM? Once considered to be tightly bracketed by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., historians have erased that arbitrary end point, correctly extending the ongoing struggle for full political citizenship into the present. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s 2004 American Historical Association presidential address, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” is the landmark publication marking the shift.1 And although her essay and the efforts of other historians since have nominally encouraged lengthening the study of the organized movement to a place earlier in time than the 1950s, few have written in that temporal direction until recently. Fewer still have considered integrating unfettered economic participation as an essential element of full citizenship into the primary civil rights thesis. By including equal opportunity to economic justice in the panoply of civil rights and citizenship privileges, the date of the movement’s birth is easily stepped backwards in time. The books discussed here give an opportunity to extend formally, by a generation, the scope of the fully modern CRM, thus including economic opportunity as essential to civic engagement. In doing so, they also examine the classification used by authors to delineate where the timeline should begin.

Cornelius Bynum’s A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights seeks (beginning in its colorblind title) to reverse Randolph’s exclusion from the A-list of civil rights heroes. A. Philip Randolph is perhaps the least explored of [End Page 492] the civil rights titans and is usually dismissed as the “vanguard” or “father” of the modern CRM, someone standing outside and prior, representing more “freedom struggle” than “civil rights.” Yet, as Bynum successfully establishes, Randolph was much more than the figurehead named honorary chair of the 1963 March, the vocal Messenger editor, or the footnoted organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph was a political ideologue whose leadership is especially relevant in the present atmosphere of race, labor, and Republican Party agenda. (This is relevant especially in that Party’s attempt to redefine the notion of “civil rights” from one of King’s pursuit of access to society’s segregated spaces to one more about Glenn Beck’s individualistic rationale for avarice2). The freedom to organize peacefully, engage in collective action, and demand economic fairness is also a civil right.

Why are Randolph’s contributions relegated to the prehistory of civil rights, even though one of his major triumphs preceded by only seven years Rosa Parks’ brave refusal to vacate her seat? Randolph’s invisibility might be explained by his 100 percent, unapologetic, no-holds-barred embrace of socialism; yet, he was also, to the same degree (after early flirtation with the doctrine), an anticommunist. “Socialist” is today’s easy epithet used to smear others with a stench of un-American behavior, not unlike McCarthy-era accusations of communism. Randolph remained committed to socialism as the path to economic justice for all workers throughout his life, but he saw no value in communism to help American workers. Perhaps because of his inconvenient ideological commitment, or perhaps because he initially pursued a colorblind approach to economic justice, Randolph is conspicuously absent from the modern civil rights pantheon (as is Bayard Rustin, who, despite convincing King to employ active nonviolence, was inconveniently homosexual).

Bynum’s A. Philip Randolph is divided into four sections based on Randolph’s intellectual progression from his childhood, riding the circuit with his minister father; to his move to Harlem in 1911; to the era...

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