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A. Philip Randolph’s Message of Justice Via Unions Still True Today |
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The economic downturn is hitting black workers especially hard, reminding us again that unions are still the best hope for people of color to gain social and economic justice.
Throughout Black History Month, which ends today, black union leaders have reminded us how that message sprung to life through the first AFL-CIO African American union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and its founder A. Philip Randolph.
Despite recent declines in African American union membership, the union still is the best bet for black workers. Today, African American union members earn 37 percent more than their nonunion counterparts and are far more likely to have health care coverage and secure pensions. (Click here to get a comparison of union and nonunion wages, health care and more.)
Clayola Brown, president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI), an AFL-CIO constituency group, says Randolph’s message that unions are important for people of color is more pertinent today than ever before.
Eighty years ago, A. Philip Randolph understood something that all of us take for granted today. He knew that if African-Americans were going to win justice if they were going to win equality it would happen not only in the courts and Congress, not only in the streets and the ballot box, but it would also have to happen in the paycheck and the wallet.
African-Americans needed good jobs with good wages and he also knew that one of the best ways for them to win those jobs was through the union.
Randolph, who died in 1979, organized the Sleeping Car Porters in 1925. The porters, as many as 20,000 in the mid 1920s, worked for the Pullman Co., which leased as many as 9,800 cars to the nation’s railroads. The workers who took care of the passengers—shining shoes, cleaning spittoons, babysitting children—were all black males. At the time the union was formed, Pullman employed more blacks than any other company.
Conditions on the trains were bad. Porters worked 400 hours a month or 11,000 miles, whichever came first, to be paid. But with tips, they could earn more than most African Americans and these jobs provided a middle-class lifestyle. But to earn that pay they endured regular racial insults. They could be sent out for weeks at a time or fired without redress.For 10 years, the union fought the Pullman Co., and in 1937, the Sleeping Car Porters became the first African American union to win a collective bargaining agreement. Click here to read a biography of Randolph.
Speaking to a Black History Month celebration earlier this week, E. Donald Hughes III, the son of a sleeping car porter, pointed out the importance of the union to the nation. Quoted in The Baltimore Sun he says:
Railroads built this country, and the dedication of the humble sleeping-car porter made it possible….If you don’t understand your own history, you’ll never understand who you really are.
To learn more about the Sleeping Car Porters, check out the DVD “10,000 Black Men Named George,” available from The Union Shop Online.™ Forming the union was just the beginning of Randolph’s fight for justice. Like many other union leaders, Randolph believed labor rights are human rights and fought for a better life for all people, especially people of color. Early on, he recognized the value of workers of all races coming together to gain justice and dignity. In 1936, he told the AFL convention:
The white and black workers cannot be organized separately as the fingers on my hand. They must be organized altogether, as the fingers on my hand when they are doubled up in the form of a fist . If they are organized separately, they will not understand each other. They will fight each other, and if they fight each other, they will hate each other. And the employing class will profit from that condition.
In 1941, he planned to lead a march on Washington to protest discrimination in federal defense plants. March on Washington rallies took place in cities across the nation, but Randolph canceled march in Washington after Roosevelt signed an Executive Order barring discrimination in defense plants and federal bureaus.
Two decades later, he organized the 1963 March on Washington, at which more than 250,000 people marched for economic justice and heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous “I Have A Dream” speech.
Randolph also gave a powerful speech that day, saying:
We are not a pressure group. We are not an organization. We are not a mob.We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.
It’s that message which still resonates today, says Norman Hill, president emeritus of APRI, and a longtime aide to Randolph:
Mr. Randolph understood that organization was the critical element in achieving social and economic justice. Without organization, all you have is a good idea. And he recognized that unions were the best vehicle for organizing people for a good cause.
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Everyone should read Beth Tompkins Bates’ wonderful book on Randolph and the Porters to gain a fuller understanding of one of America’s greatest Unionists:
http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/bates_pullman.html