A. Philip Randolph

Asa Philip Randolph was born on April 15, 1889, in Crescent City, Florida, the son of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Raised in a household that prized learning and moral conviction, he studied at the Cookman Institute in Jacksonville before moving to Harlem in 1911, where he embraced socialism and dedicated his gifts as an orator to the cause of Black economic and political freedom.

In 1917 Randolph, together with Chandler Owen, founded The Messenger, a bold monthly journal that opposed lynching and challenged injustice at home and abroad. His enduring achievement came in 1925, when Pullman porters called him to lead their new union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. As its first president he waged a patient twelve-year struggle that won the union's recognition in 1937 — the first successful African-American-led labor union in the nation.

Randolph carried the fight for dignity into the halls of power. His threatened march compelled President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 in 1941, barring discrimination in the defense industries. As the elder architect of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he opened the day before nearly a quarter-million souls, framing the movement as a summons for all who thirst for freedom.

He was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and died in New York City on May 16, 1979, at ninety years of age. May we remember A. Philip Randolph as a patient builder of justice, whose quiet dignity gave a laboring people their voice.