A. Philip Randolph

For more information on Asa Philip Randolph, visit Britannica.com.

Born the son of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Randolph was raised in Jacksonville, Florida. Graduating from Cookman Institute in 1911, he moved to New York's Harlem, working and attending City College. In response to increasing segregation and discrimination against blacks, Randolph shunned moderate reform and racial integration, as advocated by W. E. B. Du Bois, and emphasized instead socialism and trade unionism. In 1917, he founded and co‐edited the Messenger, a radical monthly magazine, which campaigned against lynching, opposed U.S. participation in World War I, urged African Americans to resist being drafted to fight for a segregated society, and recommended that they join radical unions. In 1918, Woodrow Wilson's postmaster general, Albert Burleson, revoked the Messenger's second‐class mailing privileges.

During the interwar years, Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union. In 1941, when blacks were excluded from many defense industry jobs as the United States prepared for World War II, Randolph threatened a mass protest march on Washington. The demonstration was called off when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order (25 June 1941), establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee to try to prevent such racial discrimination. In 1948, Randolph's advice helped convince President Harry S. Truman to issue an executive order banning racial segregation in the military.

[See also African Americans in the Military.]

Bibliography

• Jarvis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait, 1973.
• Paula F. A. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, 1990

The American labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979), considered the most prominent of all African American trade unionists, was one of the major figures in the struggle for civil rights.

The son of an itinerant minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, A. Philip Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida, on April 15, 1889. He attended Cookman Institute in Jacksonville, Florida, after which he studied at the City College of New York. Following his marriage in 1914 to Lucille E. Green, he helped organize the Shakespearean Society in Harlem and played the roles of Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo, among others. At the age of 21 Randolph joined the Socialist party of Eugene V. Debs. In 1917 he and Chandler Owen founded the Messenger, a radical publication now regarded by scholars as among the most brilliantly edited ventures in African American journalism.

Out of his belief that the African American can never be politically free until he was economically secure, Randolph became the foremost advocate of the full integration of black workers into the American trade union movement. In 1925 he undertook the leadership of the campaign to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), which would become the first African American union in the country. The uphill battle for certification, marked by fierce resistance from the Pullman Company (who was then the largest employers of blacks in the country), was finally won in 1937 and made possible the first contract ever signed by a white employer with an African American labor leader. Later, Randolph served as president emeritus of the BSCP and a vice-president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

In the 1940s Randolph developed the strategy of mass protest to win two significant Executive orders. In 1941, with the advent of World War II, he conceived the idea of a massive march on Washington to protest the exclusion of African American workers from jobs in the defense industries. He agreed to call off the march only after President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in defense plants and established the nation's first Fair Employment Practice Committee. In 1948 Randolph warned President Harry Truman that if segregation in the armed forces was not abolished, masses of African Americans would refuse induction. Soon Executive Order 9981 was issued to comply with his demands.

In 1957 Randolph organized the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington to support civil rights efforts in the South, and in 1957 and 1958 he organized a Youth March for Integrated Schools. In August 1963, Randolph organized the March on Washington, fighting for jobs and freedom. This was the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famed "I Have a Dream," speech, and a quarter million people came in support to the nation's capital. Randolph was called "the chief" by King. And in 1966, at the White House conference "To Fulfill These Rights," he proposed a 10-year program called a "Freedom Budget" which would eliminate poverty for all Americans regardless of race.

The story of Randolph's career reads like a history of the struggles for unionization and civil rights in this century. He lent his voice to each struggle and enhanced the development of democracy and equality in America. Randolph always said that his inspiration came from his father. "We never felt that we were inferior to any white boys…" Randolph said. "We were told constantly and continuously that ('you are as able,' 'you are as competent,' and 'you have as much intellectuality as any individual.')" Randolph died on May 16, 1979.

However, Randolph's message lived on. Seventeen years after his death, Randolph's civil rights leadership and labor activism became the subject of a 1996 PBS documentary, A. Philip Randolph: For Jobs and Freedom. The tribute that took him from "obscurity" to a force that "moved presidents," was presented in conjunction with Black History Month, in February, telling his story through reenactments, film footage and photos.

Included were powerful images of the quest, including the formation of the National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unionism Among Negroes in 1919 and the 12-year battle to organize porters in spite of the Pullman Company's use of spies and firings to thwart it.

Throughout his years as a labor and civil rights leader, Randolph rocked the foundations of racial segregation, pressuring presidents and corporations alike to recognize the need to remedy the injustices heaped on African Americans. Embracing a nonviolent, forward looking activism, Randolph will be remembered as both a "radical subversive" and "Saint Philip."

Further Reading

There are two biographies available on Randolph. Jervis Anderson's A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (1986) and Sally Hanley's A. Philip Randolph (1989), as well as Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988) will provide good insight. There were two useful sites available through the internet. A guest editorial on Randolph's work was accessed at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ellens/NCRA/randolph.html (July 29, 1997). Information on the aforementioned PBS special can be accessed at http://www2.pbs.org/weta/apr/aprprogram.html (July 29, 1997). His career and life were discussed in numerous books on African Americans and the labor movement. Among the older studies are Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker (1931); Bruce Minton and John Stuart, Men Who Lead Labor (1937); and Edwin R. Embree, 13 against the Odds (1944). More recent studies are Saunders J. Redding, The Lonesome Road: The Story of the Negro's Part in America (1958); Herbert Garfinkel, When Negroes March (1959); Arna W. Bontemps, 100 Years of Negro Freedom (1961); Russell L. Adams, Great Negroes: Past and Present (1963; 3d ed. 1969); and Roy Cook, Leaders of Labor (1966).

labor leader; civil rights leader

Personal Information

Born Asa Philip Randolph, April 15, 1889, in Crescent City, FL; died May 16, 1979; son of James William and Elizabeth (Robinson) Randolph; married Lucille E. Campbell, 1914.
Education: Attended City College of New York.

Career

Started employment bureau for untrained blacks arriving from the South, New York City; cofounder of publication The Messenger; organizer of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, New York City, 1925, president emeritus, 1968; organizer and director, March on Washington Movement, 1941; lobbied for integration of U.S. Armed Forces, 1948; organizer and director, Freedom March, 1963; American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), vice-president, executive council member emeritus. Member of Mayor La Guardia's Commission on Race (New York City), 1935; honorary chairman, White House Conference on Civil Rights; founder and president, Negro American Labor Council.

Life's Work

Throughout his 90 years, labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph rocked the foundations of racial segregation, pressuring presidents and corporations alike to recognize and remedy the injustices heaped on American blacks. Embracing a nonviolent, forward-looking activism, Randolph garnered both praise and catcalls from those within and without the progressive movements he championed; he was alternately labeled a radical, a subversive, "the most dangerous Negro in America," and "Saint Philip." Though his methods for forcing change in racist laws and labor conditions were frequently questioned, Randolph's generous, incorruptible character was never second-guessed.

Asa Philip Randolph was born April 15, 1889, to a poor family in Crescent City, Florida. His father, a bookish tailor and itinerant minister, wanted him to enter the clergy, but young Randolph, who read the works of German political philosopher and Communist Manifesto author Karl Marx while other children were pouring over Alice in Wonderland, was set on bigger challenges; he thought about becoming a congressman or lawyer--someone in a position of power and authority who could fight for the rights of blacks. After graduating from high school, he went to New York City, attracted by the ideas of educator and social theorist W. E. B. Du Bois, who had written about the need for talented blacks to excel and set an example.

Randolph's socialist leanings were cemented while he worked odd jobs and took classes at City College. He met Chandler Owen, a young Columbia University law student who shared his intellectual interests and ideological convictions, and the two started a small employment bureau for largely untrained blacks arriving in the city from the South. Randolph and Owen began a publication, The Hotel Messenger, to serve as a mouthpiece for a fledgling union of black head waiters. But the young intellectuals, who used the paper to discuss wide-ranging issues of black suffrage, were too radical, too impolitic, for the waiters union, and the relationship soon ended. The paper, in its new incarnation as The Messenger, continued, however, to provide a forum for Randolph and Owen, who argued in its pages against U.S. involvement in World War I and advised blacks around the country to arm themselves against white mob violence. The U.S. Attorney at the time, wary of such militancy, reportedly called Randolph "the most dangerous Negro in America."

Randolph and Owen failed in their early attempts to organize other black labor forces in New York City. It wasn't until 1925, after the two had parted company, that Randolph was called upon to unionize the sleeping-car porters of the Pullman Railroad Company, who had heard and read his eloquent demands for racial justice. The Pullman Company, then the largest employer of blacks in the country, had since 1909 successfully squelched the attempts of its porters to organize. The company summarily fired those porters who tried to rally their co-workers to support increases in pay and better working conditions. The porters saw in Randolph a brilliant leader who, as an outsider, would not collapse under corporate pressure.

Randolph recognized the difficulty of persuading blacks in the company--and throughout the country--to sympathize with a union, primarily because the only exposure most of them had to organized labor was through groups that were for whites only. Randolph also had to contend with the general impression among blacks that porters had a good life, traveling to exotic places around the United States and hobnobbing with the wealthy, albeit in the role of waiter or shoe-shiner. In his negotiations with Pullman Company executives--all of whom embraced the precepts of racial segregation--Randolph remained composed and cordial, using his quiet dignity to disarm those who used derogatory terms like "nigger" and "darkie." New Republic contributor Murray Kempton wrote of Randolph in 1963, "He carries a courtesy so old-fashioned that the white men with whom he negotiates are sometimes driven to outsized rages by the shock that anyone so polite could cling so stubbornly to what he believes." After ten years of discussion and a $10,000 bribe--which Randolph rejected--the Pullman Company caved in, sanctioning the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first black union in the country, and giving its members $2 million in wage increases.

Randolph, who would become known as "Saint Philip of the Pullman Porters," continued to rise through the ranks of organized labor, founding the Negro American Labor Council and becoming the first black vice-president of the powerful American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the United States. Underlying his passion for labor rights was a conviction that equality for blacks could only be achieved if economic opportunity did not fall along racial lines; as long as blacks were kept in menial jobs, unable to tap into advancing technology, Randolph believed, they would forever be treated as second-class citizens, relegated to the back of buses and restaurants.

Throughout his life, Randolph pursued economic egalitarianism through a process of coalition-building and working from the inside, which occasionally angered black militants who thought he should have been less conciliatory. He disagreed with black leaders, including Jamaican black- nationalist Marcus Garvey, who saw it as futile for blacks to attempt to rise above their hardship in the United States and advocated that they return to Africa, the land of their ancestors. Randolph was quoted as saying in Ebony magazine in 1969, "The idea of separatism is harkening to the past and it is undesirable even if it could be realized, because the progress of mankind has been based upon contact and association, upon social, intellectual and cultural contact."

Randolph, whose legend was sealed with his victory at the Pullman Company, began looking out at the nation for other areas, other industries, in which blacks were locked out of economic parity and therefore deprived of justice. In 1940 he found his rallying point in the discrimination practiced in private defense plants and the segregation of the U.S. Armed Forces. The issue was particularly acute because the United States was viewing with growing alarm the activities of German leader Adolf Hitler's war machine in Europe. Ebony contributor Lerone Bennett, Jr., wrote in 1977, "The total mobilization required by the racist nazi ideology focused renewed interest on the racist American ideology and unleashed explosive forces in the black community, where preachers, politicians, and pamphleteers announced that blacks were sick and tired of dying abroad for a freedom that had no reality at home."

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aware of Randolph's prominence, nonetheless hedged when the labor leader asked that this discrimination be stopped. Acknowledging that friendly requests and congenial meetings would never work on their own, Randolph hatched the idea of leading a protest march of 10,000 blacks in Washington, D.C., a city still in the grips of segregation. At first, newspapers and civic leaders questioned whether Randolph--or anyone--could assemble so many blacks for such a demonstration. But the march idea caught on, and eventually Randolph raised the stakes to President Roosevelt by saying that 50,000 blacks were to come, and then 100,000. As acceptance of Randolph's project grew, so did criticism. The harshest words came from those who argued that in excluding whites from his March On Washington Committee, Randolph was perpetuating the same divisiveness the march was designed to eliminate. Randolph responded, according to The New York Review of Books, by saying, "You take ten thousand dollars from a white man; you have his ten thousand dollars, but he's got your movement. You take ten cents from a Negro; you've got his ten cents, and you also have the Negro."

President Roosevelt knew the criticism challenging Randolph was minor relative to the excitement surrounding the upcoming march. He sent some of his biggest liberal guns, including his wife Eleanor, to convince Randolph that an "invasion" of so many blacks into a city inhospitable--even hostile--to them would be a mistake that could lead to violence. But Randolph did not back down, saying that if there were violence, it would be at the hands of racist whites. July 25, 1941, less than a week before the scheduled demonstration, Roosevelt issued his historic Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in the defense industry and led to the Fair Employment Practices Committee.

Randolph was praised for having successfully played hardball with the country's premier politician. But while leaders around the nation saw the importance of Roosevelt's executive order, many of them--even those within Randolph's Committee--decried the fact that the president had not provided adequate means of enforcing it. They called Randolph a sell-out when he agreed to cancel the march--he said it was a postponement--in exchange for the order. They also claimed there were many other injustices that the march would have helped expose and perhaps remedy.

Randolph's next presidential sparring match began where his bout with Roosevelt had left off. In 1948 he told a congressional committee that he would advise the youth of America--black and white--to boycott any draft until the U.S. Armed Forces were integrated. Although one senator warned that such advice could amount to treason, Randolph proclaimed that he would oppose a "Jim Crow [a system of laws and customs in the South that segregated blacks from white society]" Army until he rotted in jail. Randolph found it hypocritical that the government condoned segregation in its own ranks--including the armed forces--while Roosevelt's order had effectively forced private industry to integrate. President Harry Truman was, like Roosevelt before him, reluctant to accede to Randolph. But he finally gave in because he was in the middle of a heated reelection campaign and wanted to use civil rights to appeal to northern urban voters.

Fifteen years later, Randolph reaffirmed his commitment to civil rights by setting into motion a march that actually did materialize. Like his predecessors, President John F. Kennedy worried that bringing thousands of blacks to Washington would lead to violence. Randolph, with the same measured arguments he had used time and time again, was able not only to allay the president's concerns but also to get his endorsement. The historic August 28, 1963, March on Washington, during which revered civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, succeeded in coalescing and electrifying the civil rights movement. "The objective of Aug. 28 was more than civil rights legislation," Randolph wrote in the New York Times. "The full march was a challenge to the conscience of the country; it was a creative dialogue between Negroes and their white allies, on the one hand, and the President, the Congress and our American democratic society, on the other. Its aim was to achieve a national consensus not only for civil rights legislation, but for its implementation."

Throughout the 1960s, the status of Randolph as a champion of labor and civil rights was obscured by the emergence of younger, more dynamic firebrands. Still, King, who had been recruited into the civil rights movement by one of Randolph's proteges, referred to the inveterate activist as "the Chief." Even Malcolm X, the militant Muslim crusader who dismissed nonviolence as a weak response to racism, gave Randolph a back-handed compliment by saying he was the least confused among black leaders. In 1969, Randolph, a confirmed pacifist, was quoted in Ebony as saying "I love the young black militants. I don't agree with all their methodology, and yet I can understand why they are in this mood of revolt, of resort to violence, for I was a young black militant myself, the angry young man of my day."

Randolph died in 1979, a beloved, yet displaced, "emeritus" leader. Bayard Rustin, Randolph's friend and disciple, wrote in the Yale Review in 1987: "He was imperturbable and implacable in his single-minded commitment to his ideals and principles. He was a self-made gentleman and a prudent tactician with the grit and toughness of a boxer. Mr. Randolph was a man of quiet courage, of resoluteness without flashiness, of perseverance without pretension."

Awards

Honorary LL.D., Howard University, 1941; Spingarn Medal, NAACP, 1942; civil rights award, American Federation of Teachers, 1973.

Further Reading

Books

• Anderson, Jervis, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait, University of California Press, 1986.
• Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, Simon & Schuster, 1988.
• Franklin, John Hope, and August Meier, editors, Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, University of Illinois Press, 1982.
• Garfinkel, Herbert, When Negroes March, Atheneum, 1969.
• Hanley, Sally, A. Philip Randolph, Chelsea House, 1989.

• Ebony, May 1969; February 1977.
• New Republic, July 6, 1963.
• New York Review of Books, November 22, 1990.
• New York Times, September 29, 1963.
• Time, July 4, 1960.
• Yale Review, Spring 1987.

— Isaac Rosen

(1889-1979), labor and civil rights leader. Randolph was the most important civil rights leader to emerge from the labor movement. Throughout his long career, he consistently kept the interests of black workers at the forefront of the racial agenda. Whereas W. E. B. Du Bois argued that the problem of the twentieth century was "the color line," Randolph concluded that it was the question of the "common man."

Randolph's politics were rooted in the World War I era. A child of hard-working parents who respected learning, he left Crescent City, Florida, for New York City in 1911. Working during the day and studying at the City College at night, Randolph broadened his intellectual horizons as he read modern economic and political writers, including Marx. This theoretical grounding predisposed him to view the black working class, not the black elite, as the major hope for black progress. His associations with socialists and the continuing urbanization of the black population strengthened his working-class orientation.

In 1917, Randolph and his friend Chandler Owen founded the Messenger. The magazine's intelligent and spirited prose criticized President Woodrow Wilson as readily as Booker T. Washington and Du Bois. Its approval of the Bolshevik Revolution was cited by various government watchdogs during the red scare of 1919, although Randolph always resisted the appeal of the communists.

The postwar reaction limited the possibilities of working-class organization, but after a few false starts, Randolph in 1925 became general organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Following a long struggle, the porters, an overwhelmingly black group, won an election and then a contract with the railroads in 1937.

The victory made Randolph the leading black figure in the labor movement. He headed the new National Negro Congress, an umbrella movement of mass organizations, but resigned in 1940, believing the group was controlled by communists. Striking out independently, he organized the March on Washington movement in 1941, which succeeded in pressuring President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defense industries. After the war, a similar technique led to President Harry S. Truman's order desegregating the army.

While expanding his targets, Randolph never forgot the interests of black workers and was a constant critic of discrimination in some unions. The originator of the March on Washington in 1963, Randolph aimed to obtain government sponsorship of black jobs. Although his goal was overshadowed by the demands of the southern civil rights movement, Randolph's understanding of the economic needs of blacks predated the riots that drew the nation's attention to them. He also became a critic of the black power movement, which he believed was programmatically bankrupt.

Despite his concern for ordinary workers, Randolph's style was intellectual and aloof. Perhaps because he believed in the controlling force of self-interest, he could not fully comprehend the social and psychological impetus for the black power movement. But his theoretical bent and rationality enabled him to construct political alliances and to choose and win significant labor and civil rights objectives.

Bibliography:

Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (1972); William H. Harris, Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925-1937 (1977).

Author:

Judith Stein

See also Black Power; Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Civil Rights Movement; Labor; Marches on Washington: 1941, 1963; Racial Desegregation; Socialism.

A. Philip Randolph played a central role in the drive for civil rights for African Americans from the 1920s to the 1970s. He was the most prominent African American labor leader during his lifetime, but his leadership went well beyond the struggle to integrate labor unions. As the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, he confronted U.S. presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy over the slow pace of civil rights reform.

Randolph was born April 15, 1889, in Crescent City, Florida. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he attended City College of New York. He joined the Socialist party and campaigned against U.S. involvement in World War I, going so far as to attack W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for urging African Americans to serve in the armed forces.

His life's work grew out of a request by Pullman car porters to help them organize a union. In the 1920s railroads dominated U.S. transportation. The dining cars, club cars, and sleeping cars of passenger trains were staffed by African American porters, who earned their money primarily from the tips of passengers. Ignored by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the porters turned to Randolph for assistance.

Randolph sought from the Pullman Company recognition of the union, improved working conditions, and a minimum wage. The struggle took twelve years, but Randolph finally achieved these goals. Despite his success the AFL continued to refuse to allow black members.

World War II thrust Randolph into the national spotlight when, in 1941, he demanded that President Roosevelt ban racial discrimination in defense industries. Randolph informed the president that if his demand was not met, he would organize a mass march on Washington, D.C. Roosevelt capitulated, signing an order that integrated industries accepting federal defense contracts and which established the Fair Employment Practices Commission.

The membership of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (now part of the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks) declined in the 1950s, as airlines and automobiles became the dominant modes of long-distance transportation. Randolph continued to ascend, however, as he became vice president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in 1957.

The only prominent African American to head a union, Randolph refused to act as a mere symbol of racial integration. He repeatedly urged the AFL-CIO to integrate its unions, earning the displeasure of the organization's leadership, including President George Meany.

Randolph again achieved national prominence for promoting a march on Washington, D.C. In 1963 he called for a march to protest racial discrimination and to demand jobs for African Americans. He later agreed to join forces with other civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had called separately for a march on Washington that would focus on the need for civil rights legislation. Randolph was given the job of organizing the march. On August 28, 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place in front of the Lincoln Memorial. More than 200,000 people heard King's I Have a Dream speech, and many millions watched on television. Randolph played a central role in this important event.

Randolph continued in the 1960s and 1970s to lobby for civil rights legislation and jobs for African Americans. He died May 16, 1979, in New York City.

This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (January 2008)

A. Philip Randolph
A. Philip Randolph in 1963
Born	April 15, 1889(1889-04-15) Crescent City, Florida
Died	May 16, 1979 (aged 90) New York City

Asa Philip Randolph (April 15, 1889 – May 16, 1979) was a prominent twentieth-century African-American civil rights leader and the founder of both the March on Washington Movement and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a landmark for labor and particularly for African-American labor organizing.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Union organizer 3 Civil rights leader 4 Honors and awards 5 Bibliography 6 References 7 External links

Early life

Randolph was born April 15, 1889, in Crescent City, Florida, the second son of the Rev. James William Randolph, a tailor and ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Elizabeth Robinson Randolph, a skilled seamstress. In 1891 the family moved to Jacksonville, Florida, which had a thriving, well-established African American community.^[1] From his father, Randolph learned that color was less important than a person's character and conduct. From his mother, he learned the importance of education and of defending oneself physically, if necessary. Randolph remembered vividly the night his mother sat in the front room of their house with a loaded shotgun across her lap, while his father tucked a pistol under his coat and went off to prevent a mob from lynching a man in the local county jail.

Asa and his brother, James, were superior students. They attended the Cookman Institute in East Jacksonville, for years the only academic high school for African Americans in Florida. Asa excelled in literature, drama and public speaking; he also starred on the school's baseball team, sang solos with its choir and was valedictorian of the 1907 graduating class.

After graduation, Randolph worked odd jobs and devoted his time to singing, acting and reading. W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk convinced him that the fight for social equality was more important than almost anything else. He moved to New York City in 1911 to become an actor but gave up after failing to win his parents' approval. Columbia University student Chandler Owen shared Randolph's intellectual interests and became his close collaborator.

In 1914 Randolph courted and married Mrs. Lucille E. Green, a widow, Howard University graduate and entrepreneur who shared his socialist politics and earned enough money to support them both. The couple had no children.^[1]

Shortly after Randolph's marriage, he helped organize the Shakespearean Society in Harlem and played the roles of Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo, among others. At the age of 21, Randolph joined the Socialist party of Eugene V. Debs. In response to increasing segregation and discrimination against blacks, Randolph shunned moderate reform and racial integration, as advocated by W. E. B. Du Bois, and emphasized instead socialism and trade unionism.

In 1917 Randolph founded and co-edited the Messenger, a radical monthly magazine, which campaigned against lynching, opposed U.S. participation in World War I, urged African Americans to resist being drafted to fight for a segregated society, and recommended that they join radical unions.

He ran on the Socialist ticket for New York State Comptroller in 1920, and for Secretary of State of New York in 1922.

Union organizer

Randolph had some experience in labor organization, having organized a union of elevator operators in New York City in 1917. In 1925 Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. This was the first serious effort to form a labor institution for the employees of the Pullman Company, which was a major employer of African-Americans. With amendments to the Railway Labor Act in 1934, porters were granted rights under federal law, and membership in the Brotherhood jumped to more than 7,000. After years of bitter struggle, the Pullman Company finally began to negotiate with the Brotherhood in 1935, and agreed to a contract with them in 1937, winning $2,000,000 in pay increases for employees, a shorter workweek, and overtime pay.^[2] Randolph maintained the Brotherhood's affiliation with the American Federation of Labor through the 1955 AFL-CIO merger.^[3]

Civil rights leader

Randolph in 1942.

Randolph emerged as one of the most visible spokesmen for African-American civil rights. In 1941, he, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste proposed a march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in war industries and to propose the desegregation of the American Armed forces. The march was cancelled after President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, or the Fair Employment Act. Some militants felt betrayed by the cancellation because Roosevelt's pronouncement only pertained to banning discrimination within industries and not the armed forces, however the Fair Employment Act is generally perceived as a success for African American rights. In 1942, an estimated 18,000 blacks gathered at Madison Square Garden to hear Randolph kick off a campaign against discrimination in the military, in war industries, in government agencies, and in labor union. An example of the success this act induced is in the Philadelphia Transit Strike of 1944 where the government backed African American workers against White labour. In 1947, Randolph,along with colleague Grant Reynolds, formed the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, later renamed the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience. President Harry S. Truman abolished [[racial segregation]] in the armed forces through Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948.^[4]

Randolph was also notable in his support for restrictions on immigration.^[5] In 1950, along with Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, and, Arnold Aronson^[6] a leader of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, Randolph founded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR). LCCR has since become the nation's premier civil rights coalition, and has coordinated the national legislative campaign on behalf of every major civil rights law since 1957.

Randolph was also responsible for the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 with the help of Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is often attributed in part to the success of the March on Washington, where Black and White Americans stood united and witnessed King's 'I have a dream speech'. As the U.S. civil rights movement gained momentum in the early 1960s and came to the forefront of the nation's consciousness, his rich baritone voice was often heard on television news programs addressing the nation on behalf of African-Americans engaged in the struggle for voting rights and an end to discrimination in public accommodations. He was also an active participant in many other organizations and causes, including the Workmen's Circle and others.

Randolph was a member of the Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc.

His religious views varied over his lifetime;^[7] however, he did sign the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II.^[8]

Honors and awards

• On September 14, 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson presented Randolph with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

• A statue of A. Philip Randolph was erected in his honor in the concourse of Union Station in Washington, D.C.

• Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida currently houses a permanent exhibit on the life and accomplishments of A. Philip Randolph.

• New York City high school 540, located on the City College of New York campus, is named in honor of Randolph. The school serves students predominantly from Harlem and surrounding neighborhoods.

• The A. Philip Randolph Institute is named in his honor.

• In Jacksonville, Florida the street formerly named Florida Ave., was renamed in A. Phillip Randolph's honor, it is now named "A. Phillip Randolph, Blvd." this is located on Jacksonville's East side, near the Jacksonville Municipal Stadium.

• The A. Philip Randolph Career Academy in Philadelphia, Pa was named in his honor.

• James L. Farmer, Jr., co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality or CORE, cited Randolph as one of his primary influences as a Civil Rights leader.

• Randolph's efforts on behalf of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters were portrayed by Andre Braugher in the Robert Townsend film 10,000 Black Men Named George. The title refers to the demeaning custom of the time when Pullman porters, all of whom were black, were just addressed as "George".
• A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum is in Chicago near the Pullman Historic District.

• Amtrak named one of their best sleeping cars, Superliner II Deluxe Sleeper 32503, the A. Philip Randolph in his honor.

• Named Humanist of the Year in 1970 by the American Humanist Association.

• On February 3, 1989, the United States Postal Service issued a 25 cent postage stamp in his honor.^[9]

• In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed A. Philip Randolph on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[10]

• In 1986 a nine-foot bronze statue of Randolph by Tina Allen^[11] was erected in Boston's Back Bay commuter train station.^[12]

Bibliography

• Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (1973; University of California Press, 1986). ISBN 978-0520055056
• Sarah E. Wright, A. Philip Randolph: Integration in the Workplace (Silver Burdett Press, 1990), ISBN 0382099222
• Paula Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (1990; Louisiana State University Press, 1996). ISBN 978-0807120750
• Andrew E. Kersten, A. Philip Randolph: A Life in the Vanguard (Rowan and Littlefield, 2006). ISBN 978-0742548985
• Cynthia Taylor, A. Philip Randolph: The Religious Journey of An African American Labor Leader (NYU Press, 2006). ISBN 978-0814782873

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Pfeffer, Paula (2000). "Randloph; Asa Philip". American National Biography Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-01101.html. Retrieved 2009-11-27. 
2. ^ Current Biography 1940 671-72
3. ^ Harris, William H. (1982). The Harder We Run: Black Workers since the Civil War. New York. pp. 92. 
4. ^ "Labor Hall of Fame Honoree (1989): A. Philip Randoph". US Department of Labor. http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/laborhall/1989_randolph.htm. Retrieved 2009-11-27. 
5. ^ Scott, Daryl (June 1999). ""Immigrant Indigestion" A. Philip Randolph: Radical and Restrictionist". Center for Immigration Studies. http://www.cis.org/articles/1999/back699.html. Retrieved 2009-11-27. 
6. ^ "LCCR Founders". http://www.civilrights.org/about/lccr/founders.html. Retrieved 2009-11-27. 
7. ^ [|Taylor, Cynthia] (2005). A. Philip Randolph: The Religious Journey of an African American Labor Leader. NYU Press. ISBN 9780814782873. http://www.nyupress.org/books/A_Philip_Randolph-products_id-3822.html. 
8. ^ Humanist Manifesto II, 1973, http://www.americanhumanist.org/Who_We_Are/About_Humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_II 
9. ^ Scott catalog # 2402.
10. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8. 
11. ^ Rourke, Mary (2008-09-12). "L.A. sculptor whose subject was African Americans". Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/12/local/me-allen12. Retrieved 2009-11-27. 
12. ^ "Boston Cultural Sites". SoulOfAmerica. http://www.soulofamerica.com/boston-cultural-sites.phtml. Retrieved 2009-11-27. 

External links

• Transcript, A. Philip Randolph Oral History Interview I, 10/29/69, by Thomas H. Baker, Internet Copy, LBJ Library. 26 pages. Accessed April 2, 2005.
• A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum
• A. Philp Randolph Institute The Senior Constituency Group of the
• American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)
• [1]

Documentaries

• 10,000 Black Men Named George entry from the Internet Movie Database
• A. Philip Randolph Exhibit at the George Meany Memorial Archives of the National Labor College.
• A. Philip Randolph: For Jobs and Freedom 86 minutes, Producer: WETA-TV. Director: Dante James. Distributor: California Newsreel

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Asa Philip Randolph

v • d • e African-American Civil Rights Movement Topics and events (timeline) Albany Movement · Birmingham campaign · Black Power · Brown v. Board of Education · - Chicago Open Housing Movement - Civil Rights Act of 1964 · Civil Rights Act of 1968 · Emmett Till · Freedom Riders · Mississippi Freedom Summer · Greensboro sit-ins · Greyhound Bus Station (Montgomery, Alabama) · Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections · Little Rock Nine · March on Washington · Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party · Montgomery Bus Boycott · Nashville sit-ins · Poor People's Campaign · Selma Voting Rights Movement · 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing - Twenty-fourth Amendment · Voting Rights Act of 1965 Activists Ralph Abernathy · Victoria Gray Adams · Ella Baker · James Bevel · Stokely Carmichael · Shirley Chisholm · Dorothy Cotton · Claudette Colvin · Vernon Dahmer · Annie Devine · Medgar Evers · Chuck Fager - James Farmer · James Forman · Marie Foster · Prathia Hall - Fannie Lou Hamer · Dorothy Height · Lola Hendricks - Aaron Henry - Myles Horton - T. R. M. Howard · Jesse Jackson · Jimmie Lee Jackson - T.J. Jemison · Judge Frank Johnson - Matthew Jones · Clyde Kennard · A.D. King - Coretta Scott King · Martin Luther King, Jr. · Bernard Lafayette · James Lawson · Bernard Lee - John Lewis · Viola Liuzzo · Joseph Lowery · Clara Luper · Malcolm X · Thurgood Marshall · James Meredith · Amzie Moore - Bob Moses · William Moyer · Diane Nash · E. D. Nixon · James Orange · James Peck · Rosa Parks · Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. · A. Philip Randolph · Amelia Boynton Robinson · Bayard Rustin · Charles Sherrod - Fred Shuttlesworth - Modjeska Monteith Simkins · Kelly Miller Smith · Charles Kenzie Steele · C. T. Vivian · Wyatt Tee Walker · Roy Wilkins · Hosea Williams · Andrew Young · Whitney Young Activist groups Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) · Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) · Highlander Folk School - Leadership Conference on Civil Rights · Montgomery Improvement Association - National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) · NAACP Youth Council · National Council of Negro Women - National Urban League - Operation Breadbasket · Regional Council of Negro Leadership - Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) · Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) · Women's Political Council Historians Taylor Branch - Clayborne Carson - Michael Eric Dyson - Chuck Fager - Adam Fairclough - David Garrow - Diane McWhorter

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