A. Philip Randolph
April 15, 1889 — Crescent City, Florida
Asa Philip Randolph was an American labor union leader and civil rights activist who dedicated his life to the twin causes of economic justice and racial equality — organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, forcing the desegregation of the U.S. military by threatening a mass civil disobedience campaign, and helping plan the 1963 March on Washington at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.
From Florida to Harlem
Born on April 15, 1889 in Crescent City, Florida, Randolph was raised in Jacksonville by a minister father who instilled a passionate belief in education, dignity, and resistance to racial oppression. He moved to New York City in 1911, where he became immersed in the political radicalism of Harlem — particularly the labor movement and socialist politics. He co-founded a Black newspaper, The Messenger, and became an articulate, eloquent voice for the proposition that Black economic power and labor solidarity were inseparable from civil rights.
The Brotherhood and the Military
In 1925 Randolph began organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters — a union of Black railway workers employed by the Pullman Company, one of the most powerful corporations in America. The campaign took 12 years of persistent organizing against fierce resistance before the company recognized the union in 1937 — the first time a major American company had recognized a union led by Black workers. In 1941, he threatened President Franklin Roosevelt with a march of 100,000 Black Americans on Washington unless defense industry jobs were desegregated — Roosevelt signed an executive order doing so. In 1948, the same tactic — threatening mass civil disobedience — forced President Truman to sign Executive Order 9981 desegregating the Armed Forces.
Did You Know?
Randolph never actually carried out his threatened 1941 march on Washington — Roosevelt's executive order on defense industry jobs satisfied (partially) his demands. But twenty-two years later, Randolph helped organize the actual March on Washington in 1963, working alongside Bayard Rustin to plan the logistics of what became one of the largest demonstrations in American history. The 1963 march was, in some sense, the march he had threatened to stage in 1941 finally taking place.
Legacy in American Labor and Civil Rights
Randolph received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 from President Lyndon Johnson. He lived long enough to see many of the legal victories of the civil rights movement — the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — though he continued to argue that economic inequality remained the central unresolved question of American life. He died on May 16, 1979, in New York City. He is remembered as the architect of the strategy — economic pressure, organized labor, threatened mass action — that proved most effective in forcing the American government to act on racial equality before the mass protest movement of the 1960s gave that strategy its fullest expression.