Asa Philip Randolph had a long and varied career in twentieth-century black political activism, a fact amply documented in Andrew E. Kersten and Clarence Lang's timely edited collection. The book advances understanding of an important but complex figure with combinations of biographical studies and potted social, political and cultural histories of the movements Randolph helped lead. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), the union Randolph led from the 1920s to the 1960s, rightly forms a running thread through the collection, but attention is also paid to his less familiar but important work with the National Negro Congress (NNC), March on Washington Movement (MOWM) and Negro American Labor Council (NALC).

The project is a well-conceived one that is careful to avoid some of its attendant interpretive pitfalls. First, as we might expect, the project adopts a critical approach that avoids a hagiographical tone; especially important given the authors’ opening observation that we have “lost touch” (1) with Randolph. The contributions generally reach measured conclusions and are attentive to the methodological challenges of biographical study. For instance, an essay by Eric Arnesen dealing with the origins of Randolph's socialist thought covers new ground while remaining attuned to the limits of evidence, persuasively arguing that Randolph's significance lay not in his being an innovative thinker but in his ability to combine socialist doctrine with a hopeful, forward-looking moralistic platform geared to the concerns of black workers. Second, the study is careful to avoid forcing its diverse constituent parts into any neat historiographical paradigm. Randolph made many contributions to different forms of activism in his long career, but in the introduction Lang and Kersten rightly caution against placing Randolph in a continuous and unbroken timeline of struggle, a criticism levelled by some (including Lang in previous work) against the expansive “long” civil rights thesis.

This interpretive wariness is amply supported by the diverse findings of the contributions that follow. One consequence, however, is that it is left to the reader to do the heavy lifting in deciding what to make of the various overlaps, intersections and disjunctions that result when reading the essays in parallel. Contributions from Melinda Chateauvert and Robert Hawkins document how connected ideas about race, class and gender were interwoven through the BSCP's platform with its carefully constructed emphasis on union rights, respectable manhood and self-determination. In articles by Erik Gellman and David Lucander on the NNC and MOWM, we see glimpses of these ideas also affecting these organizations. Gellman argues that between 1936 and 1940, when assuming and relinquishing the presidency of the NNC, an umbrella organization which enjoyed particular support from unionists and those on the far left, Randolph's class-infused emphasis on “respectability” contributed to a mutual separation from younger militant activists. Though Randolph “landed on his feet” (151) with the creation of the MOWM, this latter group had been shorn of an important working-class constituency. Yet Lucander finds that despite not living up to its lofty ambitions in the field of employment discrimination, the MOWM's local branches, where women played key organizational roles, “captured a wave of grassroots discontent” (196). Both agree that one problem was the tactical limitation of not being able to follow through on threats – Randolph agreed to call off a march on the capital in 1941 in return for a federal order outlawing discrimination in defence industry hiring – but Chateauvert's work suggests additional problems relating to gender. Women were generally assigned the organizational “grunt-work” (164), which, combined with marginalization from top leadership, rankled to the point where it undercut the effectiveness of organizations like the National Council for a Permanent FEPC after the Second World War. Yet the bigger question of what shaped the effectiveness of these contemporaneous 1930s and 1940s campaigns most decisively – factors of class, race, gender, personality and political strategy – remains up in the air.

That these factors had interrelated importance is illustrated by their salience in the latter part of Randolph's career too. Tensions surrounding gender were evident in the fallout from the 1963 March on Washington, when groups like the National Council of Negro Women felt aggrieved at their sidelining during the events of the day and subsequently. Yet William Jones, who reiterates important points made in previous work about the role played by organized labor, Randolph and the NALC in the organization of the march, reaches a less pessimistic conclusion. Despite tensions surrounding the involvement of women and the Communist Party, the NALC, he writes, afforded black unionists “an unprecedented position to shape both local and national struggles for racial equality” (232). Though Jones acknowledges that these victories were weakened by subsequent events, Jeffrey Podair paints a much starker picture in his account of the Ocean–Brownsville controversy, a dispute between the white-dominated United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and a majority black school board in Brooklyn in 1968. Randolph sided with the union, a decision Podair paints as consistent with his long-standing commitment to racial advancement through union organization, but the case was a fateful and instructive one: though Randolph played a role in mediating between the two sides, his reputation took a severe blow in the black community, with the wider effect that he saw his “vision of cross-racial class solidarity” shattered in “a maelstrom of identity politics, anti-Vietnam agitation, New Left radicalism, and conservative white backlash” (246). Thus, once again, it was the collision of racial, class, political and personal factors that shaped events in Randolph's career.

As these examples illustrate, it is largely up to the reader to discern the overarching message to take from these different studies, especially regarding the crucial questions of continuity and change in black freedom struggles that historians have revisited in recent years. Nonetheless, Kersten and Lang have successfully marshalled a rich collections of essays to shed new light on an important figure while, in the process, addressing – if understandably not answering – important unresolved questions about the civil rights movement's periodization, geographical range, internal tensions and overall efficacy.