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A. Philip Randolph

1889–1979 · 90 years Tier II

The Harlem Shakespearean who organized the Pullman porters

Portrait of A. Philip Randolph — John Bottega, NYWTS staff photographer — 1963 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

His father cut cloth and preached in the African Methodist Episcopal church, his mother sewed, and both taught him that a Black family in Jacksonville had to be ready. Randolph remembered his mother sitting in the front room with a loaded shotgun across her lap while his father put a pistol under his coat and went out to keep a mob from taking a man out of the county jail. He was valedictorian in 1907 at Cookman Institute, the only academic high school for Black students in Florida. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk convinced him the fight was for social equality. He reached New York in 1911, took courses at City College, played Hamlet and Othello with a Harlem Shakespearean company, and quit acting when his parents disapproved.

He and Chandler Owen founded The Messenger in 1917, told Black men to resist the draft, and got themselves described by the Justice Department as the most able and most dangerous of the Negro publications. In 1925 the porters made him president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Pullman answered with firings and violence. Membership fell to 658 by 1933, with the lights and the telephone cut off at headquarters for nonpayment. Then the Railway Labor Act was amended in 1934, the rolls jumped past 7,000, and in 1937 Pullman signed: two million dollars in raises, a shorter week, overtime. He threatened Roosevelt with 50,000 marchers in 1941 and got Executive Order 8802. He told young Black men to refuse to register for a peacetime draft and got Executive Order 9981 out of Truman on July 26, 1948.

What he won in 1941 was less than what he asked for. Executive Order 8802 barred discrimination in defense industries and in government and said nothing about the armed forces, which was the demand he had opened with. Bayard Rustin felt sold. Zora Neale Hurston said he had been tricked and trapped in a back room. Historians working from his papers concluded he had privately treated an integrated military as unwinnable and had used it as a bargaining chip. William Harris, who admired the voice and the bearing, also called him indecisive and prone to compromise. The march he had held in reserve for 22 years finally came on August 28, 1963, and Lucille Campbell Green Randolph, the Howard graduate whose business had paid for the work since 1913, had died earlier that year. There were no children.

Johnson gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom on September 14, 1964, and he lived another 15 years, dying of a heart condition in his Manhattan apartment on May 16, 1979 with no known living relatives. The tactics outlasted him first. E. D. Nixon, a Brotherhood man, ran the Montgomery bus boycott on them, and bloc voting, mass registration and nonviolent direct action all came out of his shop. The Freedom Budget of 1967, which asked the country to spend its way out of Black poverty, went nowhere. His name is now on schools in Jacksonville, Philadelphia, Detroit and Harlem, on a Harlem square renamed in 1964, on an Amtrak sleeping car, and on a museum in Chicago's Pullman district.

Lifespan

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A. Philip Randolph's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

The Messenger other
Founded with Chandler Owen. The Justice Department called it the most dangerous of the Negro publications 1917
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters company
The first serious union of Pullman employees. He was elected president in its first year 1925
The 1937 Pullman contract other
Two million dollars in raises, a shorter workweek and overtime pay 1937
March on Washington Movement other
The threat of 50,000 marchers that produced Executive Order 8802 1941
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights company
Founded with Roy Wilkins and Arnold Aronson 1950
A Freedom Budget for All Americans book
Published by the Randolph Institute in January 1967 and never enacted 1967

Life in brief

with age at each point

1907 aged ~18 Graduates valedictorian of Cookman Institute in Jacksonville
1911 aged ~22 Moves to New York and takes social science courses at City College He acted Shakespeare in Harlem and abandoned the stage when his parents objected.
1913 aged ~24 Marries Lucille Campbell Green, whose earnings supported them both
1917 aged ~28 Founds The Messenger with Chandler Owen
1925 aged ~36 Elected president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Half the porters signed within a year. Pullman fired and beat organizers.
1937 aged ~48 Pullman signs a contract after 12 years
June 18, 1941 aged 52 Meets Roosevelt with Mayor La Guardia mediating and refuses to call off the march Executive Order 8802 followed, and the march was canceled.
July 26, 1948 aged 59 Truman signs Executive Order 9981 desegregating the armed forces
August 28, 1963 aged 74 Heads the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom Bayard Rustin organized it. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people came.