Randolph, A. Philip

Randolph, A. Philip (1889–1979), union head and civil rights leader.A socialist, Asa Philip Randolph saw economic empowerment as the key to African‐American advancement, a philosophy he espoused in his Messenger magazine in the 1920s. In 1925 he organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation's first predominantly black union, which he led until 1968. In 1937, Randolph won union recognition from the Pullman Company. Two years earlier, he had become president of the National Negro Congress (NCC), an African‐American labor organization created in response to the Great Depression. His experience with communists in the NCC strengthened his anticommunism.

In 1941 Randolph threatened a mass protest march in Washington, D.C., that led President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create a Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). Randolph subsequently lobbied to make the FEPC permanent, and his advice to African‐American men to refuse conscription into a segregated military prompted President Harry S. Truman's 1948 executive order integrating the military.

With his younger associate Bayard Rustin (1912–1987), Randolph played a key role in devising the strategy of mass, nonviolent civil disobedience that fueled the midcentury civil rights movement. He was the primary force behind the historic 1963 civil rights march in Washington, D.C. Although vice president of the merged American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO), he also created the Negro American Labor Council in 1959 to fight racism within the union movement. The A. Philip Randolph Institute, which he founded in 1964, promoted his lifelong goals, especially the struggle against economic inequality that would bring together working people of all races.
See also Labor Movements; Segregation, Racial; Socialism; Socialist Party of America.

Bibliography

Jervis Anderson , A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait, 1973.
Paula F. Pfeffer , A. Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, 1996.

Paula F. Pfeffer