A. Philip Randolph: The Organizer Two Presidents Couldn't Ignore

A. Philip Randolph never held elected office, and he moved two American presidents anyway. In 1941 he told Franklin Roosevelt he would put tens of thousands of Black demonstrators on the streets of the capital unless the government opened defense jobs to Black workers on equal terms. Roosevelt signed the order six days before the deadline. In 1948 he told Harry Truman he would counsel Black draftees to refuse military service unless the armed forces desegregated. Truman signed that order four months later. In 1963, at seventy-four, Randolph ran the march itself, and a quarter million people came without being threatened into it.

The magazine that got him arrested

Randolph was born April 15, 1889, in Crescent City, Florida, graduated valedictorian of the Cookman Institute’s class of 1907 in Jacksonville, and moved to Harlem, where he took classes at City College of New York. In August 1917 he and Chandler Owen founded The Messenger, a socialist monthly that opposed American entry into World War I and argued for unions that organized Black and white workers together instead of against each other. The Justice Department’s own assessment of the era’s radical publications described it as among “the most able and the most dangerous” the country’s Black press produced.

The government did not stop at a report. In 1918 Randolph and Owen were arrested in Cleveland and charged under the Espionage Act, the same law that sent Eugene Debs to prison that same year for an antiwar speech. The judge in their case reportedly doubted two young Black men could have written the offending material themselves and suspected a white socialist behind it. Neither man went to prison, and The Messenger kept publishing.

Organizing the men Pullman couldn’t fire

Pullman porters worked the sleeping cars on America’s overnight trains, making beds, shining shoes, minding luggage, and absorbing passengers who called every one of them “George” regardless of his actual name. Some months they worked more than 400 hours for a base wage that assumed tips would cover the rest, and they bought their own uniforms and supplies out of it. Pullman fired anyone who organized. On August 25, 1925, roughly 500 porters met at an Elks hall in Harlem and formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. They picked Randolph to lead it precisely because he was not a porter and Pullman could not fire him.

Pullman fought the union for twelve years. The Brotherhood joined the American Federation of Labor in 1935, and on August 25, 1937, exactly twelve years after that first Elks hall meeting, Pullman signed its first contract with the union: shorter hours, higher pay, and a formal grievance procedure. It was the first agreement between a major American corporation and a union led by Black workers.

A march that never had to happen

By 1940 the country was building warplanes and tanks for a war it hadn’t yet entered, and Black workers were mostly locked out of the jobs. On September 27, 1940, Randolph met President Roosevelt at the White House alongside NAACP leader Walter White and Urban League official T. Arnold Hill to press for desegregating defense production and the armed forces. White brought petitions from eighty-five veterans’ posts. Roosevelt made no commitment. Randolph concluded that asking politely had run its course.

He called for a march on Washington, and by the spring of 1941 he was promising tens of thousands of Black demonstrators in the streets of the capital if the government did not act. Roosevelt met with Randolph on June 18, with New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia mediating, and on June 25, 1941, six days before the march date Randolph had set, he signed Executive Order 8802. The order’s language was plain: “There shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” It also created the Fair Employment Practice Committee to enforce that line. Randolph called off the march but kept his organization alive to hold the new committee to its word.

Telling Truman he would counsel resisting the draft

The armed forces stayed segregated through the war Executive Order 8802 had helped integrate the factories for. Randolph and fellow activist Grant Reynolds formed the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training to press for change, and on March 22, 1948, Randolph told President Truman to his face that if the military stayed segregated, he would advise young Black men to refuse the draft. Four months later, on July 26, 1948, Truman signed Executive Order 9981. Its language matched the demand: “[T]here shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”

Building coalitions inside and outside the AFL-CIO

Randolph kept the Brotherhood’s charter through the 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations and became one of the new federation’s first Black vice presidents. He had already co-founded the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in 1950 with Roy Wilkins and Arnold Aronson, a coalition built to lobby Congress for civil rights legislation. When the AFL-CIO’s 1959 convention declined to act against segregated union locals, Randolph did not wait on the federation to change its mind. In 1960 he and dozens of other Black trade unionists formed the Negro American Labor Council to keep pressing from outside, and he served as its president until 1966.

Director, age seventy-four

On August 28, 1963, Randolph held the official title of director of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Bayard Rustin, his deputy director, had the eight weeks between the march’s announcement and the day itself to build the operation that ran the logistics: the buses, the marshals, the sound system that carried the day’s speeches to a crowd historians put at around a quarter million people. Randolph, seventy-four years old, opened the program:

We’re gathered here for the longest demonstration in the history of this nation. Let the nation and the world know the meaning of our numbers. We are not a pressure group, we are not an organization or a group of organizations, we are not a mob. We are the advanced guard of a massive, moral revolution for jobs and freedom.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke last, that afternoon, and the day is remembered for his speech. Randolph opened it, the way he had opened most of the fights that got the country to that field.

What came after

Lyndon Johnson gave Randolph the Presidential Medal of Freedom on September 14, 1964. In 1965 Randolph and Rustin founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute to keep organizing Black workers inside the labor movement, and in January 1967 the Institute published “A Freedom Budget for All Americans,” a detailed plan for full employment and an end to poverty within a decade. Congress never took it up. Randolph died in New York City on May 16, 1979, at ninety.