The family lived lives of highly respectable poverty. The home was kept impeccably neat. They followed a code of old-fashioned propriety, discipline, and etiquette. Randolph’s parents practiced perfect elocution and taught their son to pronounce every syllable of each word so that throughout his life, words like “responsibility” came out as a long, stately procession: “re-spons-a-bil-i-tay.”
Confronted by humiliating racism, they hewed to a code of moral refinement and gentlemanly conduct that jarred with their material circumstances. The elder Randolph, the biographer Jervis Anderson wrote, “was, very simply, a self-made gentleman, one who was guided by the values of civility, humility, and decency, inspired by religious and social service, and utterly devoted to the idea of dignity.”2
At school, Randolph was taught by two white New England schoolmarms who had come south to educate black underprivileged children, and whom Randolph would later call “two of the finest teachers who ever lived.” Miss Lillie Whitney taught Randolph Latin and math, while Miss Mary Neff taught him literature and drama. Tall and athletic, Randolph excelled at baseball, but he developed a love of Shakespeare and drama that would last. In the final decades of his wife’s life, when she was confined to a wheelchair, Randolph would read Shakespeare to her each day.
Most people are the product of their circumstances, but Randolph’s parents, his teachers, and he himself created a moral ecology that transcended circumstances, a way of behaving that was always slightly more elevated, slightly more formal, and much more dignified than that of the world around him. Throughout his life, Randolph’s carriage was always proper and upright. C. L. Dellums, a colleague and labor leader, remembered, “Randolph learned to sit erect and walk erect. You almost never saw him leaning back, reclining. No matter how enjoyable the occasion, you look around and there’s Randolph just as straight as if there was a board in his back.”3
His voice was soft, deep, and serene. He had an accent that people described as a cross between upper-class Boston and West Indian. He spoke in biblical cadences and used archaic words like “verily” and “vouchsafe.”4
He fought any tendency toward looseness or moral laziness with constant acts of self-mastery, whether small acts of personal conduct or large acts of renunciation. His staff marveled at the way women threw themselves at him during his travels and the gentle way he turned them aside. “I don’t think a man ever lived who women begged and chased more than that man,” Dellums would recall to a biographer, “They tried everything but rape. Webster and I had a joke between us that we followed the chief around to handle the overflow. And they were the most beautiful women…. It was always depressing having to get out of there. I’ve seen women try everything, plead with him to come up to their hotel room, for a nightcap or something. He would just say, ‘Sorry, I’m tired. I had a hard day. We better call it a night.’ Sometimes I’d say to him, ‘Chief? You kidding me?’ ”5
He did not believe in self-exposure. Outside of his writing, which could be tough and polemical, he did not often criticize others. His formality often kept people from feeling that they really knew him; even Bayard Rustin, one of his closest colleagues, always called him “Mr. Randolph.” He was not interested in money and suspected that personal luxury was morally corrupting. Even when he was an old man and globally famous, he rode the bus home from work every day. One day he was mugged in the hallway of his building. The muggers found $1.25 on him, but no watch or jewelry of any kind. When some donors tried to raise money for him, to enhance his lifestyle, he shut them down, saying, “I am sure you know that I have no money and, at the same time, don’t expect to get any. However, I would not think of having a movement started to raise money for me and my family. It is the lot of some people to be poor and it is my lot, which I do not have any remorse about.”6
These qualities—his incorruptibility, his reticent formality, and above all his dignity—meant it was impossible to humiliate him. His reactions and internal state were determined by himself, not by the racism or even by the adulation that later surrounded him. Randolph’s significance was in establishing a certain model for how to be a civil rights leader. He exuded self-mastery and, like George C. Marshall, left a string of awed admirers in his wake. “It is hard to make anyone who has never met him believe that A. Philip Randolph must be the greatest man who has lived in the U.S. this century,” the columnist Murray Kempton wrote. “But it is harder yet to make anyone who has ever known him believe anything else.”
Public-Spiritedness
The chief challenges of Randolph’s life were: How do you take imperfect people and organize them into a force for change? How do you amass power while not being corrupted by power? Even in the midst of one of the noblest enterprises of the century, the civil rights movement, leaders like Randolph were filled with self-suspicion, feeling they had to be on the lookout for their own laxity, their own sinfulness, feeling that even in the midst of fighting injustice it is still possible to do horrible wrong.
There’s a reason the civil rights leaders were transfixed by the book of Exodus. The Israelites in that book were a divided, shortsighted, and petulant people. They were led by a man, Moses, who was meek, passive, and intemperate and who felt himself inadequate to the task. The leaders of the movement had to tackle the insoluble dilemmas of Mosaic leadership: how to reconcile passion with patience, authority with power sharing, clarity of purpose with self-doubt.7
The solution was a certain sort of public-spiritedness. Today, when we use the phrase “public-spirited,” we tend to mean someone who gathers petitions, marches and protests, and makes his voice heard for the public good. But in earlier eras it meant someone who curbed his own passions and moderated his opinions in order to achieve a larger consensus and bring together diverse people. We think of public-spiritedness as self-assertion, but historically it has been a form of self-government and self-control. The reticent and sometimes chilly George Washington exemplified this version of public-spiritedness.8 Randolph exemplified it, too. He combined political radicalism with personal traditionalism.
Sometimes his advisers would get fed up with his unfailing politeness. “Every now and then,” Bayard Rustin told Murray Kempton, “I think he permits good manners to get in the way…. Once I complained about that and he answered, ‘Bayard, we must with good manners accept everyone. Now is the time for us to learn good manners. We will need them when this is over, because we must show good manners after we have won.’ ”9
The Genteel Radical
Randolph began his career by moving from Florida to Harlem, arriving in April, 1911, a month after the Triangle factory fire. He became active in theater groups, and with his elocution and presence seemed on the verge of becoming a Shakespearean actor until his parents squelched the idea. He briefly attended City College, where he read Karl Marx voraciously. He helped start a series of racial magazines, bringing Marxism to the black community. In one editorial he called the Russian Revolution “the greatest achievement of the twentieth century.” He opposed U.S. entry into World War I, believing the war only served the interests of munitions makers and other industrialists. He crusaded against Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement. In the middle of that fight some anonymous enemy sent Randolph a box containing a threatening note and a severed human hand.