Right on Track

ED: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And we’re talking this hour about the ups and downs of America’s middle class. Last week President Obama traveled to Chicago to designate a new national monument in the South Side neighborhood of Pullman.

Pullman was originally a company town, created by George Pullman to produce his namesake luxury railroad cars. Guests on those cars were treated like royalty, waited on by a fleet of famously hardworking porters. President Obama came to Pullman, because it was there that those porters created the nation’s first, all black labor union in 1925.

BARACK OBAMA: These men and women, without rank, without wealth or title, became the bedrock of a new middle class. These men and women gave their children and grandchildren opportunities they never had.

CORNELIUS BYNUM: There’s always been a black middle class. Even prior to the founding, there was a black middle class. But it hasn’t always been pegged to income.

BRIAN: This is Cornelius Bynum a historian at Purdue University. A few years ago, he published a biography of the activist who organized the Pullman porters, A. Philip Randolph. Bynum told me that while Randolph did help forge a new African American middle class in the 20th century, he himself was the product of an older black middle class. That older black middle class was defined find the one hand by African Americans who had the ear of important whites, and on the other what would seem to be the complete opposite.

CORNELIUS BYNUM: Autonomy, the degree to which a particular African American is independent from white influence. So that would be black ministers, for instance, who aren’t particularly concerned about white patronage. That would also be black entrepreneurs as well.

BRIAN: Interesting, so they may not be particularly wealthy or make much of an income, but they’re middle class because their income is not derived from whites.

CORNELIUS BYNUM: That’s exactly right. It’s about the ability to be autonomous to some degree from white influence.

BRIAN: Now you’ve written about an important African American leader, A. Philip Randolph. Could you tell me a little bit about Randolph? And I’m really interested to know if he came out of that 19th century, middle class milieu that you just described.

CORNELIUS BYNUM: Absolutely he did. Randolph was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1889, I believe. And his parents were exactly the kind of middle class community leaders that I’m talking about. His father was an itinerant AME, African Methodist Episcopal, preacher.

There are numerous instances in Randolph’s childhood where his family status comes into play. There’s one instance he recalls quite vividly where rumors of a lynching circulated around the community. And his father’s the sort of the community leader that rallies the black community to stand vigil at the county jail to ensure that nothing untoward happened to the potential victim.

And again, that’s predicated on his ability to sort of stand separate from white influence. It wasn’t something that he had to worry about in terms of economic reprisals being evicted from home, being fired for a job that gave him a kind of insulation from those kind of white reprisals that often plagued the lives of everyday African Americans.

BRIAN: Now, as we move into the 20th century, African Americans do begin to work in a white world more frequently. By that I’m talking about industrialization. They work for the railroads. They work in factories.

How do notions of what constitutes the black middle class began to change as African Americans have more daily interactions with a white world of work?

CORNELIUS BYNUM: As you move into the 20th century, what I think comes to be more defining with respect to class is consumption. Moving to cities in the first decades of the 20th century and then in the buildup to the First World War, moving into industrial employment creates sort of new economics for African Americans.

They now have greater access to disposable income. And it’s the disposable income that provides for a measure of consumption that comes to be more characteristic of black middle class status than in the 19th century. So for instance, people could not only afford to buy black newspapers, but the actual consumption of that kind of media made it possible for African Americans to find livelihoods as a journalist or as editors.

BRIAN: So as nature the of African American involvement in the political economy changes, tell me about A. Philip Randolph’s role in all of us.

CORNELIUS BYNUM: Well Randolph is both a beneficiary of some of these changes, as well as someone who comes to take the lead in shaping some of the ways in which the black middle class will find political footing in the mid 20th century.

So what I mean to say by that is that as we see this transformation in black discretionary spending in the years around the First World Ward, Randolph, in fact, will found a newspaper called The Messenger that becomes a very popular publication among African Americans in New York in particular. He’s able to publicize his political views.

That becomes the platform by which he’s invited to participate in the founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925. And this really becomes the basis of what ultimately becomes his civil rights careers.

BRIAN: You know, despite all of the progress, when race so easily and quickly can trump class for African Americans, is it fair to say that any progress has been made? Without security, without certainty that once achievements will keep one in the middle class, is one really middle class?

CORNELIUS BYNUM: That’s a great question. Can economic progress without the civil and political rights to protect it ever really be progress? I think that that much of what we’ve seen– the aftermath of the housing crash and its impact on the African American middle class, the downturn in the economy, and the kinds of pressures that those kinds of events, economic events, have put on the black middle class, really bring that whole question back to the forefront.

Can, in fact, one be in the middle class, if the expectation of being able to pass on those benefits, that wealth, is, in fact, possible? If one’s economic standing is so vulnerable to these kinds of economic shifts, can one, in fact, really be classed as middle class? I think that’s a legitimate question.

BRIAN: Cornelius Bynum is a historian at Purdue University. His book is A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights.