At one time, Asa Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was a household name. As president of the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), he was an embodiment of America's multifaceted radical tradition, a leading spokesman for Black America, and a potent symbol of trade unionism and civil rights agitation for nearly half a century. But with the dissolution of the BSCP in the 1970s, the assaults waged against organized labor in the 1980s, and the overall silencing of labor history in U.S. popular discourse, he has been largely forgotten among large segments of the general public before whom he once loomed so large. Historians, however, have not only continued to focus on Randolph himself, but his role (either direct, or via his legacy) in a wide range of social, political, cultural, and even religious milieu and movements. The authors of Reframing Randolph have taken Randolph's dusty portrait down from the wall to reexamine and reframe it, allowing scholars to regard him in new, and often competing, lights. This collection of essays gathers, for the very first time, many genres of perspectives on Randolph. Featuring both established and emergent intellectual voices, this project seeks to avoid both hagiography and blanket condemnation alike. The contributors represent the diverse ways that historians have approached the importance of his long and complex career in the main political, social, and cultural currents of twentieth-century African American specifically, and twentieth-century U.S. history overall. The central goal of Reframing Randolph is to achieve a combination of synthetic and critical reappraisal.

Combining interdisciplinary scholarship, political reportage, and personal reflection, this daring book measures the current celebrations of 1960s-era civil rights anniversaries against the realization of a black American presidency, and the stark social and economic conditions of contemporary Black America. Clarence Lang argues that the ways inwhich we remember the 1960s have serious repercussions for how we characterize the progressive legacies of that period; understand the concepts of black community, leadership, and politics; and approach the limitations and prospects for social change today. The persistence of the Sixties in the political outlook of scholars and activists highlights the need for frameworks more closely aligned with a current historical context shaped by the damaging effects of neoliberalism. On the rise since the 1970s, neoliberalism rejects social welfare protections for the citizenry in favor of individual liberty, unfettered markets, and a laissez-faire national state. Neoliberalism's effects have included the transition from industrial production to an economy driven by financial capital; market deregulation and austerity; privatization; anti-union policies; the erosion of work conditions and pay in order to generate greater productivity and higher corporate profits; declining family income and rising household debt; heightened state surveillance, harassment and imprisonment of people of color, as well as racial terrorism by white civilians; greater class stratification, both between andwithin racial/ethnic groupings; and a heightened concentration of wealth among the top one percent in this nation. The current commemorations of 1960s black freedom milestones, as well as the celebration of the nation's first black president, are important and meaningful. Yet they also expose the necessity of a more fully critical interpretation of the Sixties and suggest the significant factor of African American history - both as subject and practice - in propelling us forward.