Born, raised, and educated mostly in Florida, A. Phillip Randolph moved to Harlem in 1911 and became active in various racial causes, especially those involving labor and economics. In the 1920s, he was approached by men who worked as Pullman Car porters, who informed him about the racial practices of the Pullman Palace Car Company, a Chicago-based company that hired mainly African American men to serve white passengers aboard its luxury railroad sleeping cars.
The Pullman porters were paid much lower wages than white workers, and they worked substantially more hours. He helped organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), the nation’s first predominantly black labor union. Under Randolph’s leadership, the BSCP became the first black union to be granted a charter by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In 1934, Congress amended the earlier Railway Labor Act to specifically cover workers in sleeping cars, making it illegal for Pullman to fire members of the BSCP. The new legislation paved the way for Randolph and the BSCP to secure a collective bargaining agreement with Pullman that recognized the union, reduced porters’ monthly work hours, and raised wages.
After the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955 to form the AFL-CIO, Randolph joined the organization’s executive council; he became one of its first two black vice presidents in 1957.
Angered about the exclusion of African Americans from World War II defense jobs, A. Philip Randolph began organizing a massive march on the nation’s capital. For months, the Roosevelt administration had given Randolph vague assurances that it would do something about racial discrimination in the defense industry and the military, but nothing happened. To force the president’s hand, Randolph launched a new organization, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), to mobilize more than 100,000 Black Americans nationwide to come to DC and protest.
Fearful of destroying the Democrats’ fragile North-South alliance, President Roosevelt resisted the MOWM’s demands. But Randolph refused to budge, and a week before the March on Washington was set to take place, FDR relented, no doubt remembering the violence and controversy surrounding the 1932 march on Washington by 40,000 individuals demanding their WWI bonus checks. Randolph’s pressure tactics convinced Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in the defense industries and the federal government. Pursuant to this order, Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to enforce its mandate.
While the efforts of Southern Democrats in Congress succeeded in terminating the FEPC in 1946, the dam had been broken, and African Americans flooded to the Northeast, Midwest, and West, starting the “Second Great Migration,” which saw over 5 million Americans make this relocation.
Randolph’s most distinctive contribution was to pioneer tactics and organizations that synthesized economic and civil rights. During the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged by a prosperous economy, Randolph pressed an even bolder economic agenda. As Randolph told the massive crowd that attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (which he organized), black Americans had a special responsibility to advance economic justice for blacks and whites, because their “ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property.” It fell to black Americans “to demand new forms of social planning, to create full employment and to put automation at the service of human needs, not the service of profits. For we are the worst victims of unemployment.”
Later, Randolph and MOWM pushed for the stronger, more definitive actions taken by President Truman to desegregate the military and civil service, thereby opening public-sector employment to African Americans. I will discuss this effort later.
