A. Philip Randolph

Asa Philip Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida, on the fifteenth of April 1889, the son of a tailor and a seamstress. He moved to New York in 1911, attended City College, founded The Messenger magazine in 1917 — the leading Black socialist publication of the post-war years — and in 1925 organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

The Brotherhood was the first Black-led labor union to win recognition from a major American corporation. It took twelve years. In 1937 the Pullman Company finally signed a contract recognizing the Brotherhood and providing wages, hours, and grievance procedures for Black porters who had previously had none. By the end of the 1940s the Brotherhood had ten thousand members and was the most important Black labor organization in the country.

Randolph organized the threatened 1941 March on Washington that compelled Franklin Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8802 — desegregating the federal defense industry — six months before American entry into the Second World War. He organized the threatened 1948 demonstration that compelled Harry Truman to sign Executive Order 9981 — desegregating the United States armed forces. He was the lead organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King delivered "I Have a Dream." Randolph, sixty-four, delivered the keynote.

He served as vice president of the AFL-CIO from 1957 to 1968. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

He died in New York on the sixteenth of May 1979, age ninety.

He is honored here as the labor organizer whose threatened marches reshaped American executive order twice.