The Road to Character: Chapter 6: Dignity Summary & Analysis

Black civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph was born in 1899 in Jacksonville, Florida. His father was a minister, butcher, and tailor, and his mother was a seamstress. The family was poor but respectable. In the face of degrading racism, their sophisticated conduct rose above their material poverty. Randolph was schooled by two white teachers who had come South to educate underprivileged Black children.

Instead of being a product of his circumstances, Randolph transcended his circumstances with his moral conduct. Through his dignity, he elevated himself above the conditions around him. He spoke in a lyrical voice and had an antiquated vocabulary; he always practiced morality and self-mastery. Even when he became famous, he resisted self-exposure and the accumulation of money, believing that those things corrupt a person. His incorruptibility and dignity made him impossible to degrade and humiliate. He became a model for civil rights leaders.

Randolph attacked the problems of organizing imperfect people into groups to enact change, and amassing power without becoming corrupted by it.  Throughout his civil rights activism, Randolph was suspicious of his own sinfulness. He knew that he himself could do wrong even while fighting for justice. He worked to reconcile passion with patience and authority with leniency. He was “public-spirited,” which does not just mean he rallied protests; rather, he limited his own passions and opinions so as to bring as many diverse people as possible together. He was politically radical while personally traditional.

Randolph moved to Harlem in April 1911, a month after the Triangle Factory fire. He dabbled in theater and briefly went to City College, where he first read Karl Marx. He opposed U.S. involvement in World War I and Marcus Garvey’s “Back-to-Africa” idea, which proposed that Black people should leave racist conditions in the U.S. and return to Africa. By 1920, Randolph had started half a dozen labor unions.

Randolph helped unionize formerly enslaved people who’d been hired by a railway company because the company thought they’d be a docile labor force. The workers didn’t side with Randolph in his critique of capitalism, so he founded their union on the fight for dignity instead. During a time when one could lose their job for participating in a union, this was dangerous work. Slowly the union grew to 7,000 members. However, when the Great Depression hit, membership fell to 700, and Randolph himself fell into severe poverty.

The Black community turned against Randolph’s union because they found it too aggressive. In 1933, Roosevelt was elected, and labor laws changed. However, white employers couldn’t accept that to make change, they would have to cooperate with Black workers. Finally, the work month was reduced from 400 to 240 hours. Randolph was now the most famous Black organizer in the U.S.

In the 1940s, with the onset of World War II, the Black community was met with another injustice: labor companies building wartime infrastructure weren’t hiring Black people. In response, Randolph issued a protest march on the Washington Mall. This shocked Roosevelt, and he called Randolph into the White House. Roosevelt offered to call a few employers and tell them to hire Black people, but Randolph wanted more than this; he wanted an executive order mandating that Black people be hired. After a long stalemate, an executive order was finally issued banning discrimination in defense industries. 

After the war, Randolph fought for labor rights more broadly. He struggled to focus his energies on a single cause. The admiration he received for his moral integrity and charisma hindered the achievement of his goals. However, he contributed significantly to the civil rights model when, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, he advocated for non-violent resistance. He founded the League of Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation and suggested restaurant sit-ins and peaceful protests. This non-violent approach required discipline and self-renunciation.

Randolph and Bayard Rustin influenced each other during this time. Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania and was raised by his grandparents. His grandmother taught him to be dignified and self-controlled. She ran a Bible Group which emphasized the Book of Exodus and the Jewish experience in understanding Black liberation. Rustin went to Wilberforce College, where he came out as gay. After college, he moved to New York, where people were more accepting of homosexuality.

In Harlem, Rustin volunteered to join Randolph’s March on Washington before it was cancelled. He joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a Christian pacifist organization. He chose pacifism as a way to achieve both social change and inner growth. Achieving inner virtue means suppressing one’s rage, so Rustin took up a non-violent approach in his activism. In his twenties, Rustin became well-known in civil rights and pacifist circles. Once, he sat in the white section of a bus and then remained passive while the police beat him for his misdemeanor.

In 1943, Rustin was drafted. Instead of cooperating, he decided to go to jail. While in jail, he protested against racial segregation in the prison, sitting down in the white section of the cafeteria and stationing himself in the Whites Only section of the cell block. Whenever he was caught and beaten for this, he would maintain a calm pose of non-resistance.

Although he was a hero, Rustin sometimes succumbed to rage, recklessness, and arrogance. He was promiscuous in his sexual life, pursuing partners with a disturbing doggedness. In jail, he performed sexual acts on other inmates. This behavior disappointed the civil rights community because it undermined his reputation as a disciplined leader. The leader of FOR admonished him, saying that promiscuity destroyed deep love. Rustin eventually admitted to his failures.

While on leave from jail, Rustin ran into a fellow activist, Helen Winnemore, who confessed her love for him. Although he refused her, Rustin was touched by her selfless love, regarding it as “a sign from God” that pointed him toward the light. He rekindled a relationship with a long-term lover, hoping this would protect him against looseness. When he was released from jail, he performed many nonviolent acts of protest. As his fame grew, however, his promiscuous tendencies reawakened. He was imprisoned again for a public sex act, and his reputation never recovered.

From this point on, Rustin stayed involved in the civil rights movement from the background. He mentored Martin Luther King, Jr., in his speeches and tactics. This raised suspicion in pastors and congressmen who threatened to disband King and Rustin’s friendship, believing that the two were having a sexual affair. Randolph was Rustin’s strongest ally. When Randolph admitted his disappointment that the March on Washington never took place, Rustin suggested they organize a “mass descent” on the capital.

At first, civil rights organizations were skeptical about the march, not wanting to set themselves back by making those in power unwilling to help them. This attitude reveals that there were two civil rights movements: the first was mostly centered in the north among educated people. It proposed that society progressively becomes more knowledgeable and that, through appealing to reason, everyone will eventually see the injustice of racism. This camp was optimistic, believing that through conversation, everyone would come to see the goodness of human nature.

The other camp were “biblical realists”: they believed that humans are sinners by nature, and that in the world, the just often suffer while the unjust prosper. These people believe that the unjust will rationalize their injustice. They also believe that the just can become corrupt through trying to gain power, turning a selfless movement into fuel for their own vanity. The optimist group worships Man, believing that humans are naturally compassionate. The biblical realists worship God, believing that man is a natural sinner.

Randolph, King, and Rustin were biblical realists. They knew that those who defended segregation could not be convinced to do otherwise, and that civil rights activists themselves could not rely on their own goodwill for fear of perverting their cause into something self-serving. The only way forward was to surrender to the cause at the cost of their own happiness. As a result, biblical realists were more aggressive generally: they didn’t believe change could be made through education alone. Change could only come through relentless pressure.

That being said, the biblical realists were nonviolent, and their nonviolence coerced the unjust into performing blatant acts of injustice against their wills. In so doing, nonviolent protestors aggressively exposed the villainy of their enemies. Throughout their nonviolent protests, Rustin, King, and Randolph stood guard against their own corruptibility. They knew they were in danger of becoming arrogant and making poor moral choices as they gained more power. Rustin in particular, who’d struggled with personal vices, recognized nonviolence as a means for not only affecting social change but also one’s own discipline.

Brooks claims that the nonviolent approach is ironic: the weak succeed by suffering, the oppressed defeat the oppressor by not fighting back, and the just can be corrupted by their own justness. This ironic logic is the logic of those who see humans as a problem unto themselves, and human behavior as incomprehensible. It is important to fight injustice, but whatever power is gained in the process will corrupt even the just person. But if the strategy involves self-doubt, some victory is possible.

Rustin and Randolph rallied supporters for a real March on Washington. The violent protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, in which police brutally set dogs on girls and hurled teenagers into walls, brought everyone over to Rustin and Randolph’s side. Randolph directed the march and Rustin served as deputy, organizing a Black police force to guard the marchers and resist clashes with non-violent tactics. A segregationist senator attempted to thwart the plans by railing against Rustin’s homosexuality, but this had the opposite effect of causing civil rights figures to support Rustin.

On the day of the March on Washington, Rustin and Randolph both spoke, and King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Randolph wept after the march when Rustin told him it looked like his dream had come true. Rustin spent the rest of his life fighting to end apartheid in South Africa and continuing to defend civil rights movements. He found personal peace in a long-term relationship with one man.

The story of Randolph and Rustin demonstrates how imperfect people exercise power in a corrupt world. They both held the worldview that human nature contains innate sin. In their different ways, they built inner structures to control their impulses. They knew that the only people who could change the world were those who aggressively fought for change while at the same time understanding that they are unworthy of doing so. This philosophy of power combines conviction with self-criticism.