My wife and I recently watched Rustin, a biopic about the late civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. The movie was produced, in part, by Michelle and Barack Obama’s Higher Ground Media. It is well worth the two-hour investment, despite its flaws, especially for those of us who spend our time thinking about workers and worker power. Colman Domingo’s portrayal of the title character should be enough on its own to make the movie required viewing, but it was the reminder of the labor movement’s leadership contributions to the 1963 March on Washington --- in particular, the roles of A. Phillip Randolph and Cleve Robinson --- that jumped off the screen at me.
Colman Domingo and Bayard Rustin (Photos from Wikipedia)
These two labor leaders are portrayed in the movie and a third, UAW President Walter Reuther, is referenced several times, but never shown. The AFL-CIO remained neutral on the March, and so there was no reason to include the federation in the script.
By contrast, the great A. Phillip Randolph is the movie’s secondary hero, and justifiably so. Born in Florida just a generation after the end of slavery, Randolph was a soapbox agitator on Harlem street corners who graduated to run the The Messenger, an independent socialist magazine he co-founded in 1917 with his wife, Lucille Campbell Green. He also became a prominent member of the Socialist Party. A few years later, destiny arrived, as described by the AFL-CIO’s web site:
In June 1925, a group of Pullman porters, the all-black service staff of the Pullman sleeping cars, approached Randolph and asked him to lead their new organization, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph agreed. Besides his abiding interest in and knowledge of unions, Randolph's primary qualification for the job was his reputation for incorruptibility and the fact that he was not a Pullman Company employee—meaning the company could not fire him or buy him off. For the next 10 years, Randolph led an arduous campaign to organize the Pullman porters, which resulted in the certification of the BSCP as the exclusive collective bargaining agent of the Pullman porters in 1935. Randolph called it the ‘first victory of Negro workers over a great industrial corporation.’
Among his many other achievements, the movie correctly credits Randolph with forcing Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to issue executive orders that, respectively, integrated the defense industry and the federal government, and the U.S. military. These achievements laid the groundwork for all the civil rights executive orders and legislation that followed the March on Washington. Glynn Turman’s smart, forceful performance properly places Randolph’s depth, dignity, compassion, and power at the very center of Rustin.
A. Phillip Randolph (Photo from National Parks Service)
The movie portrays Randolph principally as Rustin’s protector and advisor, but he was much, much more. The civil rights leadership of that time chose Randolph to lead the March on Washington because he was their éminence grise. Dr. King’s brilliant leadership of the Montgomery boycott, and a host of other collective actions, writings, sermons, and speeches, made him the passionate and aspirational public face and booming voice of the civil rights cause. He also was an important strategist. Yet, the 74-year-old Randolph offered something different: gravitas. He had demonstrated the ability to bend power to his righteous purpose, even the power of presidents. With Randolph at the helm, President Kennedy must have paid especially close attention. In addition, Randolph was skilled at building and sustaining relationships that were necessary to the March’s success. He had convening power, but also organizational resources from his union. He had the status and relationships made possible by his service on the AFL-CIO’s executive council. King was vital to elevating the March and giving it a defining moment, his “I Have A Dream” speech. Randolph was needed to make the March possible and to translate 250,000 Amrericans' demands for justice into policy.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech (Photo from Wikipedia Commons)
If Barack and Michelle Obama are reading this post, and I am fully confident they are, perhaps the time has come to update the 2002 Randolph biopic called 10,000 Black Men Named George, a Showtime production. It starred Andre Braugher, who died just last month. A remake or expanded version that addresses more of Randolph’s history would be a fitting tribute to both men.
The second labor leader portrayed in the movie is Cleveland “Cleve” Robinson. The Jamaican-born Robinson was president of “District 65,” Distributive Workers Union, a polyglot union of largely low-wage service sector workers based in New York City at the time. “65,” as it was sometimes known, was independent at times and affiliated at other times with the Retail Wholesale Department Store Union and, later, the UAW. It was a unique enterprise. Originally known as the Wholesale Dry Goods Workers, it had a radical history that began when five Jewish employees of H. Eckstein and Sons Wholesale Merchant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side decided they needed better working conditions, even in the midst of the Great Depression. Its mission and diverse membership put it at the center of the struggle for racial and economic justice, including under Robinson’s four decades of leadership beginning in 1952.
Cleve Robinson and Bayard Rustin in Washington, DC in 1963 (Photo from Library of Congress)
Cleve Robinson translated 65’s mission and history into action, including by helping to found and lead the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists in 1972. But in 1963, Robinson was the Chair of the March’s Administrative Committee. He almost certainly managed and accounted for tens of thousands of dollars and a multitude of other resources donated by March supporters. Unfortunately, the movie portrays Robinson less as a leader or key organizer of the March and more as a sputtering id exploding in response to Wilkins’ provocations until controlled (or literally ushered out of a room) by Randolph. Perhaps that is an accurate portrayal of the great man. I never had the privilege of meeting him. I worry, however, that Robinson’s role in the movie is little more than a stereotype of trade unionists as visceral and physical rather than intellectual, strategic, and cerebral.
The great looming off-screen presence is the late UAW President Walter Reuther, who has been in the headlines lately because of comparisons between current UAW President Shawn Fain and his predecessor. Reuther led the UAW during its post-World-War-II, pre-globalization heyday when it boasted roughly 1.5 million members. Reuther was a civil rights stalwart and close ally of Dr. King and others in the movement. UAW staff and activists lent critical support and financing to civil rights actions across the country. Just two months before the March, Reuther and other leaders in Michigan brought Dr. King to Detroit where he led 125,000 people in the Detroit Walk to Freedom.
Walter Reuther & Dr. MLK, Jr. (Photo from UAW)
Why was it that large elements of the labor movement joined together with the civil rights movement in support of the March on Washington in 1963 and so many other actions across the country? And why does labor remain prominent in the civil right battle today? Walter Reuther answered that question in his speech at the March:
I am for civil rights, as a matter of human decency, as a matter of common morality. But I am also for civil rights because I believe that freedom is an indivisible value that no one can be free unto himself. And when Bull Connor with his police dogs and fire hoses destroys freedom in Birmingham, he is destroying my freedom in Detroit.
When you watch Rustin, ask yourself, whose names should take Bull Connor’s place of infamy in Reuther’s speech? And are unions and other institutions living the creed today that Reuther laid out 60 years ago; that is, the fight for freedom, the fight for equal justice, and the fight for economic justice affect us all?
