Happy Labor Day!
A. Phillip Randolph was born in 1889 in the deeply segregated South. When he was reduced to performing menial labor despite an outstanding academic record, he headed north – to Harlem. Amid the fervor of the Harlem Renaissance, he encountered the socialism of Eugene Debs, became a renowned soapbox orator and, with Chandler Owen, founded the magazine The Messenger, a radical publication now regarded by scholars as among the most brilliantly edited work in African American journalism.
In response to the Harlem race riots of 1919, Randolph and Owen formed the National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unionism Among Negroes. Soon a group of Pullman car workers asked Randolph to help them organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The group’ engaged in a bitter 12-year battle with the notorious Pullman Company, which tried repeatedly to destroy the union using spies and firings.
The 1934 Wagner Act finally created a level-playing field, enabling the Brotherhood to win an organized contract in 1937, the first ever between a company and a Black union. In the 1940s Randolph developed the strategy of mass protest to win two major executive orders.
In 1941, with America’s entrance into World War II, he developed the idea of a massive march on Washington, D.C., to protest the exclusion of African American workers from jobs in the industries that were producing war supplies. He agreed to call off the march only after President Franklin Roosevelt (1882–1945) issued Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in defense plants and established the nation’s first Fair Employment Practice Committee.
In 1948 Randolph warned President Harry Truman that if segregation in the armed forces was not abolished, masses of African Americans would refuse entering the armed forces. Soon Executive Order 9981 was issued to comply with his demands. In 1957 Randolph organized the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington to support civil rights efforts in the South, and in 1957 and 1958 he organized a Youth March for Integrated Schools.
In August 1963, Randolph helped organized the March on Washington, D.C., fighting for jobs and freedom. Randolph was called “the chief” by King. And in 1966, at the White House conference “To Fulfill These Rights,” he proposed a ten-year program called a “Freedom Budget” which would eliminate poverty for all Americans regardless of race.
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