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Contemporary African-American scholars across the humanities and social sciences share a preoccupation with posing big questions about the dilemmas of black life in the United States. Under the historic presidency of Barack Obama, the relevance of tackling African-American thought and action in the post–civil rights period has only grown. One of the leading voices among a cohort of black political scientists considering these themes has been Michael C. Dawson, whose new book, Blacks In and Out of the Left, takes on the question of strategy for contemporary left black politics. Dawson has long been concerned with the potential for solidarity within a black American population increasingly diverse in class and culture. In Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics, which appeared in 1994, he explored how African Americans retained a strong sense of group identificationdespite becoming more economically differentiated.

Atone time, Asa Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was a household name. As president ofthe all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), he was an embodimentof America's multifaceted radical tradition, a leading spokesman for BlackAmerica, and a potent symbol of trade unionism and civil rights agitation fornearly half a century. But with the dissolution of the BSCP in the 1970s, theassaults waged against organized labor in the 1980s, and the overall silencingof labor history in U.S. popular discourse, he has been largely forgotten amonglarge segments of the general public before whom he once loomed so large.Historians, however, have not only continued to focus on Randolph himself, buthis 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 fromthe wall to reexamine and reframe it, allowing scholars to regard him in new,and often competing, lights. This collection of essays gathers, for the veryfirst time, many genres of perspectives on Randolph. Featuring both establishedand emergent intellectual voices, this project seeks to avoid both hagiographyand blanket condemnation alike. The contributors represent the diverse waysthat historians have approached the importance of his long and complex careerin the main political, social, and cultural currents of twentieth-centuryAfrican American specifically, and twentieth-century U.S. history overall. Thecentral goal of Reframing Randolph isto achieve a combination of synthetic and critical reappraisal