A. Philip Randolph was a labor leader and civil rights activist who founded the country’s first large black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) in 1925. In the 1930s, his organizing efforts helped to end both racial discrimination in the defense industries and segregation in the US military. Randolph was also a major organizer of the March on Washington in 1963, which paved the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act the following year.
Early childhood and moving to Harlem
Asa Philip Randolph was born April 15, 1889 in Crescent City, Florida, where his father was a preacher of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He grew up in an intellectual home, and Randoph and his older brother both studied at the Cookman Institute in Jacksonville, a Methodist school founded during Reconstruction as Florida’s first all-black higher education institution.
Inspired by the writings of leading black intellectual WEB Du Bois, Randolph moved to New York in 1911. He moved to Harlem, where he found a job as a switchboard operator in a building and enrolled in classes in the City. College of New York. . Randolph’s dedication to the socialist cause led to employment for the Brotherhood of Labor, an employment agency for black workers. In 1914 he married Lucille Green, a young widow who graduated from Howard University who owned a beauty salon in the building where he worked.
Randolph’s “messenger” and socialist politics
Randolph and Chandler Owen, a law student and other socialist thinker, met in 1915 and became close friends. The two men joined the Socialist Party the following year and soon began to publish a magazine, Hotel messenger (later renamed on Messenger), to advance their socialist views and rally their African-American compatriots to the cause. In 1918 Randolph and Owen were arrested and jailed briefly for sedition for their public criticism of Woodrow Wilson’s presidential administration and his policies during World War I.
Randolph was an early supporter of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). But by 1920, he and other influential black leaders in Harlem had begun to publicly criticize Garvey, helping to spur a federal investigation that would ultimately lead to Garvey’s expulsion.
Foundation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP)
In the summer of 1925, Randolph received an invitation to speak to a group of porters from the Pullman Palace Car Company, a Chicago-based company that mainly hired African-American men to serve white passengers in their sleeper cars. luxury. Pullman porters generally received much lower wages than white workers and were subjected to punitive working hours and conditions. After that first meeting, Randolph agreed to help organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BCSP), the country’s first predominantly black union.
Under Randolph’s leadership, the BSCP became the first black union to obtain a charter from the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In 1934, Congress amended the old Railroad Labor Act to specifically cover workers in sleeper cars, making it illegal for Pullman to fire members of the BSCP. The new legislation paved the way for Randolph and BSCP to win a collective agreement and sign a contract with Pullman that recognized the union, reduced porters’ monthly working hours and increased wages.
After the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955 to form the AFL-CIO, Randolph joined the organization’s executive board; he became one of its first two black vice presidents in 1957.
Civil Rights Activism and the March on Washington
During this time, in addition to workers’ rights, Randolph had gained national notoriety as a strong advocate for racial equality. In 1941, he announced a large protest march in Washington, DC, aimed at convincing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to end discrimination in the country’s defense industries. After Roosevelt responded by issuing Executive Order 8802, which opened war industries during WWII to black workers and created the Fair Employment Practice Commission (FEPC), Randolph canceled the planned march. In 1948, Randolph’s activism also helped persuade President Harry Truman to desegregate the United States Armed Forces with the passage of the Universal Military Service and Training Act.
Randolph organized several other large protest marches in the nation’s capital in the late 1950s, including the Prayer Pilgrimage (1957) and two youth marches to protest the slow pace of school desegregation in the South. In 1959, he helped found the Negro American Labor Council (NALC), which aimed to combat racial discrimination within unions.
In 1963, Randolph worked with his fellow activist Bayard Rustin to lead the massive March on Washington held on August 28. At the event, nearly 250,000 people gathered to hear from civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., who delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Randolph, including beloved wife Lucille died just weeks before the event, told the crowd she was witnessing the start of a new fight “not just for black people but for all Americans who thirst for freedom and a better life “.
Final years and founding of the A. Philip Randolph Institute
The March on Washington helped pave the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the first major civil rights law since the Reconstruction Era. That same year, Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Randolph the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his career as an activist. In 1965, Rustin took over the new A. Philip Randolph Institute, which replaced the NALC as the primary vehicle for advancing Randolph’s labor and civil rights goals.
Randolph retired as president of the BCSP in 1968, and his public profile gradually declined as his health worsened. He spent his last years living quietly in New York City and died in 1979 at the age of 90.
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JY Smith. “A. Philip Randolph dies at age 90. The Washington Post, May 17, 1979.
A. Philip Randoph: Biography. The Martin Luther King Jr. Institute for Research and Education at Stanford University.
Andrew E. Kersten. A. Philip Randolph: A Life at the Vanguard. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007)
