By Sikivu Hutchinson
As the nation commemorates the 1963 March on Washington, many are unaware of the towering role played by freethought pioneer A. Philip Randolph. Randolph founded the March on Washington movement during World War II as a challenge to wartime employment discrimination and the segregation of African American troops. As founder of the trailblazing black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union and publisher of the radical socialist journal the Messenger, Randolph was a crucial voice of activist resistance to American imperialism, capitalism, and racial disenfranchisement. Left activist freethinkers like Randolph understood that they had to reach across the ideological “aisle” to organize with progressive believers. This was a necessity if they were going to gain any traction in their local communities. As I wrote in my 2011 book Moral Combat:
Randolph utilized religion to reach the black masses. Although Randolph was widely believed to be an atheist, he understood the appeal religious themes had for a black constituency born and bred on religiosity.[i] Randolph relied on black churches and religious organizations for political outreach and community support. As one of the first black union organizations in the U.S., Brotherhood meetings and forums were frequently held at or supported by local black churches across the nation. Insofar as the BSCP’s platform drew on religious themes, Randolph’s acknowledgment of and respect for religion can perhaps be viewed as a form of cultural competence. However, throughout his career as publisher and editor of the influential journal the Messenger, Randolph provided a platform for vigorous critique of Christianity’s role in black liberation struggle. In 1927, the journal sponsored an essay writing contest titled “Is Christianity a Menace to the Negro?”[ii] As a socialist and vocal critic of “orthodox” Christianity, Randolph was constantly plagued with accusations of being an infidel. Of course, known infidels couldn’t be effective black leaders. According to Cynthia Taylor:
In the beginning the Messenger editors set out to attack all that was ‘narrow and medieval in religion,’ especially the Negro Church’s accommodation to Jim Crow. Randolph himself redirected this counterproductive editorial policy in order to reach out to progressive-minded allies inside and outside the Negro Church. With the demise of radicalism by the 1920s, Randolph and other Messenger editors nonetheless kept up the debate on ‘orthodox’ black Christianity by offering religious alternatives to their readers…In this process, Randolph insisted that religious ideas and institutions were not so sacrosanct as to be excluded from democratic debate…In the Messenger’s last phase…he consciously distanced himself from atheism while still challenging the Negro Church’s position.[iii]
Taylor also notes that Randolph’s distancing from atheism was influenced by anti-communist sentiment that would crescendo in the post-World War II era. Randolph was especially sensitive to the charge; he believed that being smeared as a non-believer was also motivated by racism. Being a non-believer, black, and part of the radical left was a lethal combination. Like many radical organizers aligned with communist and socialist politics during this period, Randolph was the subject of an FBI probe and frequent smears by the mainstream media. As the organizer of the first planned March on Washington in 1941, his later vision of community organizing was both socialist and humanist. Equitable living wage jobs, decent affordable housing, and full enfranchisement were basic human rights. The absence of these rights in the twentieth century U.S. made a mockery of its claim to democracy. In the context of Randolph’s political organizing, Christianity became a lingua franca for black solidarity and not a litmus test.
Fifty years later, as the wealth gap between whites, African Americans and Latinos in “exceptionalist” America has become more egregious,Randolph’s towering leadership on social and economic justice remains a model for radical humanist organizing.
[i] Clarence Taylor, Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight for Equality from Jim Crow to the 21st Century (New York: Routledge, 2002), 13-15. Taylor argues that Randolph framed black labor and civil rights resistance in terms of religious triumph/redemption rather than in terms of class struggle. Cynthia Taylor argues that Randolph publicly denied he was an atheist perhaps out of political expedience; the “charge” atheist and communist were often yoked together to discredit progressive leaders. See Taylor, A Philip Randolph: The Religious Journey of an African American Labor Leader (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 2006), 80-82.
[ii] Cynthia Taylor, 70.
[iii] Ibid., 84-5.