Randolph, A. Philip (1889–1979)

IN THE 35 YEARS before the birth of the modern civil rights movement that he helped to spearhead, A. Philip Randolph was the most prominent—and the most effective—African American leader in the United States. His persuasiveness and adroit use of political pressure on two presidents led to creation of the first federal civil rights enforcement body as well as full integration of the armed forces.

The son of a Florida minister who impressed on his sons a love of the classics and an appreciation for black heroes of history, Randolph moved to New York City for a college education and in hopes of becoming an actor. But he forged a friendship with Chandler Owen, a law student and a socialist, and abandoned the stage for a lifetime commitment to leftist politics. In 1915, they cofounded The Messenger, billed as “the first radical Negro magazine,” and Randolph gained fame in Harlem as a soapbox orator. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer tried to suppress the magazine during World War I, then arrested Randolph for urging blacks not to serve in the armed forces; the charges were later dropped.

Eventually, Randolph turned to labor organizing and joined the fledgling Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which he built into a union that was 8,000 strong—and the first with a membership that was almost exclusively African American. But it would take a dozen years before the railroad companies were willing to recognize the Brotherhood union and negotiate a contract with the workers, which they finally did in 1935.

It took Randolph longer, however, to force an end to racial discrimination within his own trade-union movement. For decades, he pressed the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to end segregation in its member unions; those efforts were rebuffed by AFL leader George Meany, who once indignantly demanded, “Who the hell appointed you as the guardian of all the negroes in America?”

In 1941, Randolph called for a national march of African Americans on Washington, D.C., the first mass protest of its kind, to demand an end to segregation in the military and discrimination in defense employment. The prospect so alarmed President Franklin D. Roosevelt that, after failing to pressure Randolph into canceling the event, he agreed to form the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which prohibited discrimination throughout the federal government, whereupon Randolph agreed to abandon the march. Threats of a similar march nine years later prompted Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, to integrate the armed forces.

Randolph did not openly oppose America's participation in World War II, as he had done in the previous global conflict. But he warned that “unless this war sounds the death knell to the old Anglo-American empire, it will have been fought in vain.” Ever the dedicated socialist, he declared that “only a peace without imperialism will be a just peace that will endure.”

By 1963, Randolph realized that mass protest was necessary to force a wholesale change in American racial attitudes, and he called for the March on Washington of 1963, where Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The event served as a symbolic passing of the torch from Randolph to a new generation of civil rights leaders. Illness prevented him from playing a key role in the activist politics of the 1960s, and his open denunciation of the militant black nationalist movement led younger activists to deride him as out of touch. But the movement he helped found continued to resound to his call that “We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.”

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