Powerful labor unionist and civil rights activist, Asa Philip Randolph spent forty years of his life in constant battle for better working conditions and higher wages for all laborers, and equal rights for Black Americans. Asa Philip Randolph was born April 15, 1889, in Crescent City, Fla. When Randolph was a toddler, his parents moved to Jacksonville, FL, which was home to an established Black community. Though they faced the horrors of segregation and hatred in the South of that era the family provided a safe place to live and a good education for Randolph. His parents were firm believers in Black people’s right to equality and the right of people as a whole to be treated fairly and humanely. 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 at the local county jail.
With his older brother James, Randolph attended Cookman Institute in East Jacksonville, the state’s only academic high school for African Americans at the time. Randolph enjoyed literature, drama, public speaking, baseball and choir, and he was valedictorian of the 1907 graduating class. Although he was able to attain a good education in his community at Cookman Institute, he did not see a future for himself in the discriminatory Jim Crow era south. Barred by discrimination from all but manual jobs in the South, Randolph moved to New York City in 1911, where he settled in Harlem. He found a job working on the switchboard in an apartment building and other odd jobs. Randolph enrolled in courses at City College majoring in social sciences.
There, he helped organize the Shakespearean Society in Harlem. With them, he played the roles of Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo, among others. Randolph aimed to become an actor but gave up after failing to win his parents' approval. Randolph devoted his time to singing, acting, and reading. Reading W.E.B. DuBois' "The Souls of Black Folk" convinced him that the fight for social equality was most important, which led to his developing his socialist political philosophy. In 1913, Randolph courted and married Mrs. Lucille Campbell Green, a widow, Howard University graduate, and entrepreneur who shared his socialist politics. The couple had no children. In New York, Randolph became familiar with socialism and the ideologies the Industrial Workers of the World espoused.
Randolph tested his speaking skills at one of Harlem’s first “soapbox corners” at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, where speakers would preach to the people on the sidewalk. He met Columbia University Law student Chandler Owen, and the two developed a synthesis of Marxist economics and the sociological ideas of Lester Frank Ward, arguing that people could only be free if not subject to economic deprivation. In 1917, Randolph and Chandler Owen founded "The Messenger" with the help of the Socialist Party of America. It was an outspoken, highly opinionated, radical magazine, which did not gain financial success. "The Messenger" would become an influential magazine among Black readers nationwide. It did serve as a vehicle for Randolph's viewpoints on war and capitalism. The magazine featured articles that equally criticized the ideologies of Black leaders from different factions just as readily as White politicians.
"The Messenger" established Randolph and Owen as leading figures in civil rights and socialist circles. At this point, Randolph developed his distinctive form of civil rights activism, emphasizing the importance of collective action for African Americans to gain legal and economic equality. To this end, he and Owen opened an employment office in Harlem to provide job training for southern migrants and encourage them to join trade unions. Randolph's first experience with labor organization came in 1917, when he organized a union of Black shipyard workers and elevator operators in New York City. In 1918, Randolph and Owen were arrested and jailed briefly for sedition for their public criticism of Woodrow Wilson’s presidential administration and its policies during World War I. During the war Randolph and Owen pushed for Black soldiers and civilians to be hired for more positions and to receive higher wages within the armed forces.
The U.S. attorney general even tried to prevent the United States postal service from delivering "The Messenger" to subscribers. After the war, tensions lessened, although not in Harlem. There a new African American activist named Marcus Garvey was attracting large crowds with his speeches. 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, including W.E.B Du Bois, in Harlem had begun to publicly criticize Garvey, helping spur a federal investigation that would eventually lead to Garvey’s deportation. In 1919 he became president of the National Brotherhood of Workers of America, a union which organized among Black shipyard and dock workers in the Tidewater region of Virginia. The union dissolved in 1921, under pressure from the American Federation of Labor.
The railroads had expanded dramatically in the early 20th century, and the jobs offered relatively good employment at a time of widespread racial discrimination. Because porters were not unionized, however, most suffered poor working conditions and were underpaid. The porters were required to pay for their meals and to purchase their own uniforms and equipment. They were not compensated for the five hours of preparation time before trips or any overtime. They also worked straight through without any layover time. The Pullman Company employed more Black workers than any other U.S corporation. Pullman porters were generally paid far lower wages than White workers. Chicago employed the greatest number of Pullman Porters.
Pullman Porters were persistent, asking the Pullman company to address their concerns around pay and conditions. As the work force grew, so did it's influence. Porters played a major role in advancing Black culture carrying Black newspapers, like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburg Courier to nearly every corner of the U.S. As they read stories of workers standing up to their employers, porter's own sense of agency grew. "The Messenger" connected African Americans across the U.S and it connected Porters with one another. Editorials in "The Messenger" campaigned against lynching and called for integration. It also urged it readers to join Black unions. Randolph had the ability to influence masses, and wasn't afraid to ruffle feathers and wouldn't be intimidated by the Pullman Company. The Porters felt that he was the right man to lead their union.
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 hired mainly Black men to serve White passengers aboard its luxury railroad sleeping cars. After this initial meeting, Randolph agreed to help organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BCSP), the nation’s first predominantly Black labor union. This was the first serious effort to form a labor institution for employees of the Pullman Company, which was a major employer of Black men. By 1925, the Pullman company employed 12,000 Porters, and Randolph wanted to organize as many of them as possible. The company cultivated goodwill from African Americans by generous donations to organizations, such as churches, yet conditions were hard, and wages weren’t as generous as the work deserved.
Local action by Pullman meant it was hard for its workers to get sympathy in trying to unionize, a situation which wasn’t helped by the infiltration of spies to report on union activity. Another restraint on the power of the workers was the fact that strike action, although an inconvenience to passengers, would not hinder the profitable freight side of the Pullman business. The law also failed the Brotherhood. Mediation failed, so did arbitration. And when the men prepared for a strike as a last resort, the company recruited strikebreakers and private police. At the last moment, the strike was called off. Randolph and the Brotherhood traveled the country, preaching their message of fair treatment and fair wages in other cities where Pullman had a presence. The Pullman Company did everything in its power to stop the union, they fought back with violence, intimidation, propaganda and firing Porters who openly supported the union.
The company attacked Mr. Randolph, calling him a Bolshevik and accusing him of being a hustler out for a fast buck. They refused to even recognize the Brotherhood as a legitimate union, claiming they were covered by its company union. By 1928, the Brotherhood members was losing faith. In keeping with the time, some unions such as branches of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), (the precursor to today’s AFL-CIO) did not accept Black people as members. The next year the stock market crashed, which made matters worse. A lot of people lost their jobs and the porters didn't want to risk losing theirs. The Pullman company knew that and they threatened to replaced the porters with scabs. They fired thousands of Porters, many who remained chose to abandon the Brotherhood and cling to their jobs, knowing it would be near impossible to find jobs elsewhere. There was no since in rocking the boat.
Wherever he went, Mr. Randolph had one important sermon for the porters. They were Black men who were being called upon to prove that "Black men are able to measure up." And the men never forgot that message. The organization was in constant battle for twelve years. Things changed when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932. With amendments to the Railway Labor Act in 1934, porters were granted rights under federal law. Union membership jumped to over 7,000 nationwide. The National Labor Relations Act, outlawed company unions that did not provide workers with independent bargaining power. Roosevelt was a friend to labor and Asa Philip Randolph seized the opportunity. Joining forces with other labor groups, he gained support from middle class African Americans for labor organization. The Brotherhood leadership lobbied Congress, asking to be recognized as the official union representing the porters.
After several failures and the near bankruptcy of the union at the outset of the Great Depression, the Pullman Company finally conceded to their demands. Randolph finally won certification of the BSCP as the exclusive collective-bargaining agent of the Pullman porters in 1935. Randolph called it “the first victory of Negro workers over a great industrial corporation” Randolph said. The American Federal of Labor accepted BSCP as a member the same year. On August 25th 1937, twelve years after the Brotherhood members began their fight, they reached an agreement with Pullman over working conditions. It was the first agreement between a union of Black workers and a major U.S corporation. The agreement brought an additional two million dollars in wages to the eight thousand porters. They saw an increase in pay, received overtime and other benefits. The BCSCP union greatly increased Randolph's national prestige.
Through his success with the BSCP, Randolph emerged as one of the most visible spokespeople for Black men and women civil rights. In the early Civil Rights Movement and the Labor Movement, Randolph was a voice that would not be silenced. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to issue an executive order banning discrimination against Black workers in the defense industry, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste proposed a march on Washington. The march was to protest racial discrimination in war industries, an end to segregation, access to defense employment, the proposal of an anti-lynching law and of the desegregation of the American Armed forces. Randolph's belief in the power of peaceful direct action was inspired partly by Mahatma Gandhi's success in using such tactics against British occupation in India. Randolph referenced Gandhi as an inspiration just as Martin Luther King Jr. would over a decade later.
Randolph threatened to have 50,000 African American march on the city. Just the threat of the march moved Roosevelt to act. It was cancelled after Roosevelt issued the Fair Employment Act. Nonetheless, the Fair Employment Act is generally considered an important early civil rights victory. He issued the executive order on June 25, 1941, six days before the planned march was to occur. The order declared that “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” Roosevelt created a Fair Employment Practices Commission to enforce it. He won the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) Spingarn Medal in 1942.
After World War II, Randolph demanded that the government integrate the armed forces, especially because there was a peacetime draft in place. He founded the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation and urged young men, both Black and White, to “refuse to cooperate with a Jim Crow conscription service.” Randolph’s call to action pushed President Harry Truman to act just as it had with Roosevelt. Truman feared widespread civil disobedience and the loss of the Black vote in his 1948 reelection bid. On July 26, 1948, the President signed Executive Order 9981, banning racial segregation in the armed forces. However, whilst it didn’t immediately end segregation, it began the desegregating process. Randolph amongst others was at first displeased with the ambiguity of the order, but the civil disobedience campaign was called off. This may not seem like a clear victory, but it was clear that Randolph and his organization had been successful in amplifying the issue of unfair treatment and segregation in the armed forces.
In 1950, Randolph helped create the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR). This group has been a major civil rights organization. It helped pass every major civil rights law since 1957. Randolph was elected a vice president of the newly merged AFL-CIO in 1955. He used his position to push for desegregation and respect for civil rights inside the labor movement as well as outside. Randolph organized several other major protest marches in the nation’s capital in the late 1950s, including the Pilgrimage of Prayer (1957) and two youth marches protesting the slow pace of school desegregation in the South. In 1959, he helped found the Negro American Labor Council (NALC), which aimed to fight racial discrimination within labor unions.
Randolph had demonstrated the power of mass protest and civil disobedience, and it had a strong influence on the emerging generation of civil rights leaders. In an echo of his activities of 1941, Randolph finally realized his vision for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Despite his wife’s illness, he continued to perform a role in gathering together the various, and often uncollaborative civil rights groups and leaders to attend the march. In 1963, Randolph worked with fellow activist Bayard Rustin to spearhead the massive March on Washington held on August 28, 1963, which attracted 250,000 plus to the nation's capital. Randolph, whose beloved wife, Lucille, died only weeks before the event, told the crowd they were witnessing the beginning of a new fight “not only for the Negro but for all Americans who thirst for freedom and a better life.” This rally is seen as a high point of the modern era Civil Rights Movement.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed the next year. President Lyndon B. Johnson presented the 74 year old Randolph with the Presidential Medal of Freedom that same year. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. Also during that year, Rustin took charge of the newly founded A. Philip Randolph Institute, which replaced the Negro American Labor Council (NALC), as the primary mode of advancing Randolph’s labor and civil rights goals. After he retired as president of the BSCP in 1968, Randolph co-founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute to promote trade unionism in the Black community. He continued to serve as an AFL-CIO vice president until 1974. Never having been one to be concerned with material acquisitions or the ownership of property, Randolph spent the next few years writing his autobiography until his health worsened, forcing him to stop. Randolph died in New York City on May 16, 1979. The importance of Asa Philip Randolph's contributions to the 20th-century American Civil Rights Movement is significant. A statue of Randolph stands as a memorial in Washington, DC’s Union Station, a tribute to his railroad roots and a nod to the many participants in the 1963 March on Washington who came to the city by rail.