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Richard Avedon, A. Philip Randolph, Founder, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, New York City, April 8, 1976 |
From Asa to A. Phillip: Nothing
But a ‘Sigma’ Man by Mark Anthony Neal
NewBlackMan (in Exile) | @NewBlackMan
One of the most important images of the
Black masculinity in the 20th century came courtesy of Michael Roemer’s
film Nothing But a Man. Set in Alabama, but filmed on location,
primarily in Atlantic City, NJ throughout 1963 – it was completed a month after
the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – Nothing But a Man, with
its focus on Black masculinity and fatherhood, in relationship to work and
organized labor, serves, in part, as a tribute to Asa Phillip Randolph,
co-founder of The Messenger, who is most well known as the organizer of
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
During the Freedom Rides and Civil
Rights Marches of the early 1960s, in which media coverage often depicted Black
men as loose cannons with little respect for the law, however unjust, Nothing
but a Man offered a rarely seen, and perhaps unprecedented, portrait of
Black men. As such the director Michael Roemer used NAACP field workers
to help do research for the film, adding a level of authenticity to the
narrative. At the center of the film was Duff Anderson, portrayed with
brooding nuance by Ivan Dixon, whose gestures – facial and physical – conveyed
the complexity of Black manhood that had been usually presented in television
and film as cartoonish and threatening. Duff was neither Stepin Fetchit, the
bumbling and shuffling character that actor Lincoln Perry made a crossover star
in the 1930s or Malcolm X, an icon of Black militancy for generations.
Duff Anderson was, as the film title suggests, just a man.
Working with an all-Black unionized
section gang, so called “gandy dancers”, who helped maintain railroad tracks
throughout the South, Duff meets and falls in love with the “preacher’s
daughter” Josie, who was portrayed by noted Jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln. Yet
Duff carries many of the demons that burdened Black men throughout the early
20th century: he left a four-year-old son in Birmingham with a woman that he
didn’t marry, he was estranged from his own father, and though working the
railroad afforded him some freedom and money in comparison with most
working-class Black men, the work isolated him from community and family.
At every turn as Duff considers marrying
Josie, raising his estranged son, and starting a family with Josie, it is the
question of a work life balance – far different from most whites – in which
life is not just a metaphor for the quality of living, but for life itself.
Duff, for example, after marrying Josie and having to leave his
unionized railroad job, takes a job at a local sawmill. When Duff tries to
subtly organize the Black men at the mill to “stand up for themselves” he is
summarily fired, and subsequently blacklisted from jobs at other mills.
“Now, if you want to work like a real nigger” a local bartender tells Duff,
“You can always go out and chop cotton.” Faced with only job opportunities that
he saw as both demanding and backward (“They done that too long in my family”),
Duff chose flight.
Duff Anderson is an echo of the men that
A Phillip Randolph first organized as elevator operators, and later as sleeping
car porters, where trade unions offered Black men some modicum of financial
security, a level of social respect among Negros, and a finer sense of their
masculinity, in an era when manhood was largely tethered to your ability to
have stable employment. Yet in the bartender’s suggestion, one can hear
Eugene Debs’ “Appeal to Negro Workers” (1923) cautioning Black workers to not
be “willing to be menials and servants and slaves of the white people.”
It was an appeal that Randolph took seriously in the formation of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters — the use of “Brotherhood”, perhaps a nod
to the African Blood Brotherhood of Cyril Briggs, which was also influential on
the ideas of the young A. Phillip Randolph after he moved to Harlem in
1911. Indeed, “Brotherhood, Scholarship, Service!” – the mantra of the
Brothers of Phi Beta Sigma – would remain a guiding principle of A Phillip Randolph.
Randolph’s migration from Jacksonville,
Fl to the emerging Black Mecca of Harlem would be the stimulus for what
historian Cornelius L. Bynum describes as a process of “reinvention” for
Randolph, notably in his transition from being simply known as “Asa” to
becoming “A. Phillip”, which carried an aura of the cosmopolitanism that would
be in the spirit of the New Negro Movement. Randolph’s Harlem
“homecoming” was not unlike that of many other Negroes, who were being
reinvented to all that paid attention as “New Negroes.” That so many came
“Home to Harlem” or Chicago under the guise of opportunity served as a usable
metaphor for a reimagining of Blackness, manhood and politics.
These were processes of transformation
that were befitting the so-called Jazz age, where in the spirit of modernist
creativity, social and artistic improvisation and the collaborative ethos of
the Big Bands of James Reese Europe, Fletcher Henderson, and Duke Ellington,
many would claim as their entry point into a world made anew. Among them
would be Randolph, who finds his initial footing with “Ye Friends of
Shakespeare” – The Harlem Shakespeare Society – where his sense of
performatively, which would later have an outlet in his oratory, would align
with his sense of an emerging radicalism, social consciences, and talent for
organizing. In Shakespearean drama, Randolph found one of his defining
mantras: “above all to thine own self be true then thou canst be false to no
man.”
“Culture for Service, Service for
Humanity” – the Brothers of Phi Beta Sigma are often reminded, and it was a
phrase that Randolph began to embody, even in the earliest years of the
Fraternity. Randolph finds his political voice in The Messenger,
the journal that he launched with fellow socialist traveler Chandler Owens. The
pages of The Messenger were a site of spirited debate with other
journals like Cyril Brigg’s Crusader, Hubert Harrison’s Negro Voice
and most notably Marcus Garvey’s Negro World. That such debates often
spilled out to street corners, where activist stood on boxes, speaks to the
palpable spirit of discourse that was in that moment, an analog or pre-digital
example of what #BlackTwitter once was. That Randolph and Owens utilized
community book clubs and study groups, as part of a broader effort that Jarvis
R. Givens details in his important book Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson
and the Art of Black Teaching, highlights their commitment to “Black
Study”.
The New Negro marked a period in which
Black men came to public voice, though Randolph and the pages of The
Messenger offer a more complex view of gender in that moment. Indeed,
one of The Messenger’s major patrons was Lucille Campbell Green
Randolph, a local Harlem businesswoman and wife of A. Phillip Randolph.
“The New Negro Woman, with her head erect and spirit undaunted…ever
conscious of her historic and noble mission of doing her bit toward the
liberation of her people in particular and the human race in general” is how The
Messenger described Black women in a 1923 issue devoted to “The New Negro
Woman.” Though Lucille Campbell Green Randolph was not a member of Zeta Phi
Beta, Inc., her marriage, and partnership with her husband mirror the
relationship between the sorority and Phi Beta Sigma, which are
constitutionally bound. Indeed, when one glances at the rather dour
demeanor of Randolph in the many photos taken of him during the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one sees the impression on an elder who is
being pushed to the margins of a movement that he helped create, as much as a
man, who lost his life partner, only months earlier in April of 1963.
It was on the pages of The Messenger
that Randolph called into question the idea of the “Slacker Porter” contrasting
him to the “manly man”. As Robert Hawkins writes “Through this binary
opposition, Randolph constructed an ideal of black working-class manhood
founded on dignified work, race pride, and labor solidarity.” Like many
of his peers, Randolph was not immune to the so-called “respectability”
politics of the era, as he sought to rehabilitate the idea of the Black worker
through trade-unionism. And indeed, these were some of the most pronounced
themes of Nothing but a Man, which also linked those attributes to an
idealized Black fatherhood. Nothing But a Man was also notable for
its soundtrack, which featured music exclusively from the Motown Recording
company, which was then an up-and-coming Black-owned corporation that had only
been incorporated, three years before the film was shot. It was both prescient
on Roemer’s part and savvy of label owner Berry Gordy to include ‘The
Sound of Young America” as part of the film’s soundscape. Indeed, Gordy’s
bet on a Black popular music that would crossover to White mainstream audience
would dramatically shift the prospects for many Black musicians well into the
future.
None of this would have been conceivable
to Randolph, who in erecting a language of manhood for Black working-class
union members, pitted those workers against “the tip-taking, working-class
musician.” Ironically, given Randolph’s own proximity to Black performance and
the Black creative classes, his stance seems surprising. But what
Randolph was juxtaposing was the image of hard-working Black men to that of the
itinerant Bluesman, sitting at a train station, performing for his meals. As Miriam Thaggert argues in her book Riding
Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad, the train
platform was a site in
which the right for Black people to sell their wares, whether fried chicken
sandwiches or a blues tune, were contested. When Randolph, to use
Hawkins’ words, asked porters to decide whether they were proudly laboring
union men or musical mendicants performing on the street for whatever the
Pullman Company and the traveling public might throw their way,” he was
contributing to this discourse.
Nearly a century after Randolph offered
those words, and in a historical moment when labor unions continue to be under
assault – especially those who are visibly Black – one wonders how Randolph
would view the situation of run-of-the-mill Black musician or rapper – or
Hollywood writer, who sell their wares to transnational corporations but are
offered little beyond the status of a contract laborer.
***
Mark
Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African &
African American Studies at Duke University, and member of the Delta Zeta Sigma
(Durham) Alumni Chapter of Phi Beta Sigma, Incorporated.
Source: newblackmaninexile.net
