Background
Asa Philip Randolph was born on April 15, 1889 in Crescent City, Florida, the second of two sons of Elizabeth Robinson and James William Randolph, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
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Asa Philip Randolph was born on April 15, 1889 in Crescent City, Florida, the second of two sons of Elizabeth Robinson and James William Randolph, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Philip Randolph spent his childhood in Jacksonville, Florida, and completed high school in 1907 at the Cookman Institute, a missionary school.
In 1911, because it was impossible for a young black man to find meaningful work or to develop a career in Jacksonville, Randolph left for New York City. Although he dutifully promised his mother that he would return at the end of the summer, he had left Jacksonville for good to find a job and become a Shakespearean actor.
Randolph never received a major acting role in New York, but through acting he began to develop the deep, resonant voice and superb oratory that came to characterize his persona. In addition to studying acting, Randolph attended classes at City College and the Rand School of Social Science, where he steeped himself in social economics and Marxian socialism, but because of the eclectic curriculum he chose he never attained a degree.
Randolph's move to New York, and especially to the Harlem section of Manhattan where he settled, coincided with the first major wave of African-American migration into the city. There were 65, 000 blacks in the city in 1910; by 1920 the number had risen to 152, 000. Harlem became the center for cultural, political, and economic activity among African Americans, and Randolph was at home in this cauldron of intellectual and cultural activity. While he attended college classes, Randolph spent a large part of his early years in New York as a magazine editor and street-corner orator.
The soapbox orators of the time, including Marcus Garvey of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (the back-to-Africa movement), provided much competition and intellectual stimulus for Randolph, but he more than held his own. Indeed, he claimed great pleasure in having presented Garvey to his first audience in Harlem. It was also during this early period that Randolph began a relationship with two individuals who would be lifelong companions and associates.
In 1917, after several efforts with Owen to organize black workers in Harlem had failed, Randolph joined him in founding the Messenger, a magazine that took a radical stance against racial discrimination and on economic issues. Randolph was committed to the idea that the "rights of men are more sacred than the rights of property" and saw the solution to the racial problem in America wholly in economic terms. Accordingly, both employers and unions that discriminated against black workers and denied them access to jobs felt his wrath. During World War I, Randolph saw little hope for the advancement of black workers through the organized labor movement, especially as long as it was led by Samuel Gompers, whom Randolph termed "the chief strike breaker in America. "
The Messenger was especially outspoken in its opposition to the participation of the United States in World War I and was particularly opposed to the involvement of blacks in the war because of the country's racist military and domestic policies. Randolph's loud opposition to the war led to his arrest as a war protester. While Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer described the Messenger as the ablest African-American publication; he also called Randolph "the most dangerous Negro in America. " Palmer tried to influence the Post Office Department to deny the Messenger third-class mailing privileges and thus silence the magazine, but the postmaster general, acknowledging that the Messenger was protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, refused to grant the attorney general's request. The arrest charges were also dropped.
In 1925 began the job that was to occupy first claim on his time throughout the remainder of his long life. In that year, already thirty-six years old and, in the view of one observer, "a man whose time had passed him by, " Randolph accepted the invitation of a group of New York-based Pullman Company porters to lead the efforts to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). Though he was not a porter, the porters' selection of Randolph as president of the organization made sense.
Despite his reservations about the efficacy of the general labor movement for blacks, Randolph had previously tried to organize black workers, including elevator operators and waiters on passenger ships. He also was the editor of a magazine that could serve as the new union's journal, and because he was not a porter the Pullman Company could not fire him. As general organizer of the BSCP, Randolph immersed himself in his work and with the able assistance of trusted lieutenants, especially Milton P. Webster of Chicago, organized BSCP locals in the major railway centers throughout the nation. With what became characteristic bravado, Randolph vowed to "bring the Pullman Company to its knees. " Like most nascent and financially weak organizations, the BSCP struggled during most of its early history. The Pullman Company publicly ignored it and abstemiously refused to bargain with the union.
The BSCP received almost the same reception from general organized labor, especially the American Federation of Labor (AFL), some of whose member unions still had constitutional bars against the membership of black workers, and whose organizing philosophy centered on crafts rather than on industrywide groups. It was during this difficult period that Randolph exhibited remarkable leadership skills and brought together disparate elements of both blacks and whites to aid the porters' cause. Randolph believed that "public opinion [was] the most powerful weapon in America, " and he used every available venue to keep the BSCP's message before the public. Moreover, through the union's troubled early years, Randolph carried himself with such dignity and personal incorruptibility that he came to personify the porters' cause.
The public opinion campaign he waged, combined with his personal stature, enabled Randolph to maintain support for the union among a solid core of porters, numerous community leaders and public officials, and large numbers of average citizens, even as the nation endured the severe deprivation of the Great Depression. It was not until 1935, after the National Labor Relations Act improved overall the bargaining power of unions, that the Pullman Company entered into negotiations with BSCP over the wages and working conditions of porters.
That same year, during the bitter split between the AFL and the unions that became the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the BSCP received an international charter from the AFL. Through a decade of struggle Randolph had kept faith with his pledge to make the BSCP the sole bargaining agent for Pullman porters. In 1937 the union and the company signed their first agreement, which gave the porters pay increases, shorter hours, and overtime pay; Randolph became a larger-than-life personality.
Through his personal charisma he had succeeded in making the BSCP a major civil rights organization for African Americans, not just a union of sleeping car porters. By 1937, Randolph was a major spokesman on behalf of blacks, especially the working class, and was participating in a wide range of labor and civil rights activities. In 1935 he was elected president of the National Negro Congress, a broad-based organization of black rights organizations, a position he held until he resigned in 1940 with a warning to black leaders to eschew the involvement of whites, and especially Communists, in black organizations. Indeed, Randolph became - and remained - deeply anti-Communist because of Communist efforts to take over the BSCP and because of Communists' success in exercising wide influence over the National Negro Congress. Randolph launched the most important period of his career at the outset of World War II, when he used his union to lead an assault on the nation's racist domestic policy.
As the war spread in Europe and the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt edged closer to supporting the Allied forces, Randolph noted that while the Great Depression was ending for white Americans little had changed for blacks. Unlike his opposition to World War I, Randolph was not opposed to American efforts to rid the world of Adolf Hitler, but he was convinced that if the nation went to war, Americans could not suffer the misery of war, either on the battlefield or at the home front, and return to the same kind of domestic racial policy that existed in 1940. The clearest evidence of change, he believed, would lie in improved employment and working conditions for blacks.
Accordingly, in 1941 Randolph called on the federal government to outlaw racial discrimination in employment and hiring and to end segregation in the nation's armed forces, and he promised to organize a massive march on Washington, D. C. , by blacks to demand compliance. When he announced his call for a march on July 1 and organized the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) - largely an arm of the BSCP - Randolph for the first time took a purely racial stance on an economic issue. Unlike his efforts to gain multiracial support for the union, this time he argued that MOWM leadership and membership should be all black. The time had come, he said, for "Negroes to fight their own battles. "
He called for what became known as the "Double V" Campaign - African Americans would be willing to fight against Nazism and later Japanese aggression abroad but they would also fight at home to rid the nation of the tyranny of racism. In his initial call for a march, Randolph claimed that 10, 000 blacks would demonstrate in the capital, but within weeks black newspapers picked up his cause, and as the spring of 1941 wore on the number was escalated to 50, 000. The MOWM became the largest mass movement of blacks since Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association of the 1920's. As the summer approached Randolph raised his claim of the number of protesters to 100, 000 and national leaders began to worry.
Randolph had directed the march threat at President Roosevelt, through his insistence that the president issue an executive order meeting the MOWM's demands. In an effort to defuse the issue the president sent his wife, Eleanor, who had a good reputation as a friend of African Americans, and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York City, a friend and confidant of Randolph's, to talk the BSCP leader into calling off the march.
The president thought that the nation could ill afford the spectacle of thousands of black citizens demonstrating in the streets of the capital, especially when the German propagandists looked for any excuse to highlight disharmony within the United States. His disquiet was heightened by the fact that Washington was a southern city which in 1941 had a white police force wholly willing to use harsh action to clear the streets of the black protesters. All of their entreaties went to naught. Randolph, with the steadfast support of Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), informed the president's emissaries that nothing short of a presidential executive order would halt the march. The impasse led to direct conversations in June between MOWM leaders and the White House, including the president, but failed to end or delay the threat of the march.
Thus, on June 25, in order to stave off domestic disruption, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which mandated an end to discrimination in hiring and union membership for companies and unions that did business with the government and established the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to oversee compliance. Executive Order 8802 was in many ways a significant victory, but Randolph suffered much abuse in the black press and among some of the younger members of the MOWM leadership for having accepted a compromise.
Bayard Rustin, who became one of Randolph's most devoted and trusted aides, was prominent among the detractors. Though they recognized that for the first time since the Civil War blacks had forced the government to admit its complicity with racial discrimination and to accept its responsibility to end that policy, they faulted Randolph for not holding out for the whole package.
The executive order did not mention segregation in the military, for example, and the FEPC was at best a weak entity. But Randolph knew something that others did not; the MOWM had been a march in name only, and it was highly improbable that 10, 000 marchers, certainly not 100, 000 people, would have appeared in Washington at the appointed time. He knew that his was a big bluff that had succeeded, and that large numbers of people had continued to maintain that they would march because of their personal commitment to him. He had gotten the best deal he could at the time and would use his new influence to work for improvements in the future.
During the years following World War II, Randolph carried on his work with organized labor and continued to stress the relationship between economic improvement and civil rights for African Americans. In 1955, after the AFL/CIO merger reunited the organized labor movement, Randolph accepted a seat on the executive council of the new organization and used his position to press for an end to union discrimination.
Moreover, he insisted that black workers be given leadership positions within the organized union movement. In 1959, after having made little progress on that front, Randolph took the leadership in forming the Negro American Labor Council (NALC), which was to be all black, fight for employment for African-American workers, and press for black "participation in the executive, administrative, and staff areas of unions. "
Early in 1963 he again called for a march on Washington during the late summer. Using the NALC's organizational structure and the organizing genius of Rustin, Randolph cobbled together the national leadership to make the march come off. On August 28, millions across the nation and around the world heard on radio and television the memorable words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as he stood before the throng of more than 200, 000 that stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument and spoke of his dream for America.
Many thought that King was the organizer of the march, but the fact is that it was Randolph's march and in his speech that day Randolph reminded America that "the sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality. "
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which federal officials tried to stall as they had the proposed march in 1941, led almost directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After the march Randolph continued as president of the BSCP until he retired in 1968 and saw his union disappear after its merger into the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks. In retirement, Randolph spent most of his time as an elder statesman for both the civil rights and organized labor movements, operating mainly from his home in New York City, where he died.
Randolph had a significant impact on the Civil Rights Movement from the 1930s onward. The Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama was directed by E. D. Nixon, who had been a member of the BSCP and was influenced by Randolph's methods of nonviolent confrontation. Nationwide, the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s used tactics pioneered by Randolph, such as encouraging African Americans to vote as a bloc, mass voter registration, and training activists for nonviolent direct action.
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Randolph avoided speaking publicly about his religious beliefs to avoid alienating his diverse constituencies. Though he is sometimes identified as an atheist, particularly by his detractors, Randolph identified with the African Methodist Episcopal Church he was raised in.
In 1914, Randolph met Chandler Owen, a writer, and Lucille Green, a widow and cosmetologist. Randolph and Green were married in November of that year and were separated only by her death in 1963.
