Randolph, A. Philip

RANDOLPH, A. PHILIP (1889–1979). The youngest son of an impoverished Florida preacher deeply involved in racial politics, Asa Philip Randolph became the most effective black trade unionist in the United States and attained a position of prominence in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement second only to Martin Luther King. Throughout an active career that spanned more than fifty years, he remained one of the great orators of the left, headed up the National Negro Congress, speared the March to Washington Movement that led to the integration of the defense industries during World War II, and remained the leading proponent of the view that racial and economic justice were inseparable goals.

Already in high school, Randolph was known as “the “Cambridge man” because of his oratorical skill and impeccable dress. Introduced at home to the debates between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, he publicly identified himself with Du Bois’s vision of “the talented tenth,” rejected the accommodationist policies associated with “the Tuskegee Machine,” and declared himself a “racial radical” in favor of social equality. These views make Randolph’s migration to Harlem in 1911, his rejection of the ministry, and his conversion to socialism seem inevitable. He voted for Eugene Debs and joined the Socialist Party in 1916. Still, he sympathized with Washington’s down-to-earth, matter-of-fact approach to organization, his emphasis on industrial wages as a key to black development, and his separatist approach to achieving equality.

Despite early aspirations to a career on the stage, Randolph found his success in the sectarian debates at City College of New York (1911–1917) and as a street orator in Harlem. He organized support for the strikers in Paterson, New Jersey, and Lawrence, Massachusetts, led black opposition to World War I (which Du Bois supported), and joined Marcus Garvey, whom he later opposed bitterly, in demands for the Versailles peace negotiations through the International League of Darker Peoples. Garnering twenty-five percent of the Harlem vote for Socialist Morris Hillquit in 1917, Randolph himself got 200,000 votes as the Socialist Party candidate for NY State Comptroller in 1920.

Randolph remained a pacifist throughout his life, though he advocated self-defense in response to the “red summer” race riots in 1919 and broke with the Socialist Party and the Non-Partisan League over their opposition to World War II.

In 1917, under the influence of the West Indian political internationalist, Hubert Harrison, Randolph and Chandler Owen founded the socialist journal The Messenger, which published political commentary, advocacy of trade unionism and literature of the New Negro Movement. In its upbeat combination of culture with politics, its sympathies for the Industrial Workers of the World, its semiofficial status as an organ of the Socialist Party, and particularly of black opposition to the war, The Messenger closely resembled The Liberator (later the New Masses), though the journals appear to have had little contact. Noting the irony of African American participation in World War I, fighting to make the world safe for democracy abroad when black people were denied equality at home, The Messenger argued, “Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has. Party has no weight with us; principle has.” For their outspoken opposition to black participation in the war, Owen and Randolph were arrested under the Espionage Act, but not prosecuted. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer dubbed Randolph “the black Lenin” and “the most dangerous black in America.”

After a number of false starts with other unions, Randolph accepted an invitation to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) in 1925. Fighting against Pullman’s company union, widespread intimidation and much of the black press, Randolph built a national organizing committee from current and former porters, including Ashley Totten in New York, Bennie Smith in Detroit, Milton P. Webster from Chicago, C. L. Dellums from Oakland, and E. J. Bradley of Saint Louis. His strategy was to use clandestine organizing and public and governmental pressure to force Pullman to recognize the union and improve working conditions, issues he felt were as important as wages. When the BSCP failed to carry out a threatened strike in 1926, membership plummeted by almost ninety percent and, soon after, labor historians Sterling Spero and Abram Harris announced the union had collapsed. However, in 1935, largely due to New Deal labor legislation Randolph helped to write, the BSCP won the first nationwide election under the new Labor Relations Board, eight to one. Pullman signed its first union contract in 1937, reducing working hours from 400 to 240 a month, and union membership jumped to nearly fifteen thousand.

In February of 1936, working closely with Communist New Dealer James P. Davis, Randolph helped to convene the National Negro Congress, an assemblage that met in Chicago of 817 black and white delegates, most from northern cities, reflecting a cross-section that extended from the National Housewives League through meatpackers, steelworkers and Communist student activists, New Dealers and Bishops. Thousands more attended its evening sessions. In addition to Davis and Randolph, key players included Ralph Bunche, and Ella Baker (who would become famous as mentor to SNCC and advisor to Martin Luther King), as publicist. From the three years Randolph served as President of the NNC (1936-1939), what the civil rights historian Thomas Sugrue calls “the most promising vehicle for Black Liberation in Depression Era America” spearheaded “the proletarian turn in black politics.” As a multi-racial coalition representing some 1.2 million members that drew heavily on the packing house, steel and garment unions as well as some 70 local chapters, the NNC provided a major alternative to the NAACP and Urban League through direct confrontations that ranged from fights against slum lords behind the yards in Chicago to discrimination on the Berkeley campus. At a massive NNC rally in Philadelphia in 1938 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, an audience of nearly 10,000 listened while Eleanor Roosevelt denounced the “persistence of slaves of many kinds in America” on a platform that also included Chrystal Bird Faucet (the first black woman elected to U.S. House) and CIO leader John Edleman. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact in l939 the United Front fell apart and the NCO ended its pressure on FDR to integrate the defense industries. Randolph resigned as its President in 1940 and the organization lost its reach. But the legacy of the NCO is the continued recognition of civil rights as a question of power; the importance of creative coalition building and of industrial unionism as a key to racial equality.

Randolph’s national prominence grew when, at the outset of the buildup for war in 1941, he seized the opportunity to connect the “right to work” to racial equality by threatening to bring 100,000 Negroes to Washington unless the war industries were integrated. To assist Randolph in this work, A.J. Muste (American Workers Party, Fellowship of Reconciliation) sent two organizers, Rustin and James Farmer, who became life-long Randolph allies and civil rights leaders in their own right. In response to the threat of a March, personal pressure from Randolph (as part of Roosevelt’s ‘Black Cabinet’), the Black Press (an early ‘internet’) and “civil rights riding the rails’ via the Pullman Porters, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in June, 1941 ending discriminatory hiring in defense industries and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee (F.E.P.C.) to provide oversight. In 1947, this time by threatening a national campaign of civil disobedience against the draft, Randolph helped evoke Truman’s Executive Order 9981, ending discrimination in the military.

Randolph’s success on national stages contrasted with the relative isolation of the BSCP within the trade union movement. While the American Federation of Labor recognized the BSCP after the Pullman success, throughout his career, Samuel Gompers blamed blacks for union racism (a position echoed by Randolph’s colleague Bayard Rustin in the 1960s); and the railway unions, so radical in other respects, steadfastly opposed including blacks. Randolph fought unsuccessfully against the color barriers in the American Federation of Labor throughout the thirties and, as late as 1961, he was personally censured by the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (which included David Dubinsky, Joe Curran, and James Carey) for “causing the gap that has developed between organized labor and the Negro community.”

As the elder statesman for an activist (and separatist) approach to civil rights during the sixties, Randolph was frequently asked to mediate disputes between warring factions. He helped bring the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., into the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington, supported the Youth Marches for Integrated Schools (1957–1958) and helped, along with Rustin and the A. Philip Randolph Institute, to initiate and coordinate the 1963 March on Washington at which he delivered a powerful address on economic rights. Randolph (and the institute) were harshly criticized for supporting the United Federation of Teachers during the 1968 teachers’ strike and for their negative views of the riots, black power, black capitalism, and black anti-Semitism. Despite this, however, Randolph remains the only American socialist to have achieved prominence in both the black and trade union communities.

Anderson, Jervis. A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Harris, William H. Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925–1937. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, Chicago, Illinois. https://aprpullmanportermuseum.org

Pfeffer, Paula F. A. Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996.

Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.

Wilson, Joseph F. Tearing Down the Color Bar: A Documentary History and Analysis of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.