A. Philip Randolph

Asa Philip Randolph was born on April 15, 1889, in Crescent City, Florida. His parents were huge supporters of equal rights for African Americans and general human rights. In 1891, the family moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where Randolph would eventually attend the Cookman Institute, one of the first institutions of higher education for blacks in the country.

After graduating from Cookman in 1911, Randolph moved to Harlem with the desire of becoming an actor. During this time, he studied English literature and sociology at City College; held a variety of jobs, including an elevator operator, a porter, and a waiter; and developed his rhetorical skills. In 1912, Randolph founded an employment agency with a Columbia University law student, Chandler Owen, called the “Brotherhood of Labor”. The goal of the organization was organizing black workers. He began his efforts when, while working as a waiter on a coastal steamship, he organized a rally against their poor living conditions.

In 1913, Randolph married a Howard University graduate and beauty shop entrepreneur named Lucille Green, and shortly thereafter organized a drama society in Harlem known as “Ye Friends of Shakespeare.” He would play several roles in subsequent productions by the group. In 1917, during World War I, Randolph and Owen founded a political magazine, “The Messenger”. They began publishing articles calling for the inclusion of more blacks in the armed forces and war industry, and demanding higher wages. Randolph also tried to unionize African American shipyard workers in Virginia and elevator operators in New York City during this time.

After the war ended, Randolph became a lecturer at the Rand School of Social Science. In the early 1920s, he unsuccessfully ran for offices in New York State on the Socialist Party ticket. Randolph became more convinced than ever that unions would be the best option African Americans.

In 1925, Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). Serving as its president, he sought to gain the union's official inclusion in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which frequently barred African Americans from membership. The BSCP was met with resistance, primarily from the Pullman Company, which was the largest employer of blacks at that time. But Randolph battled on, and in 1937, won membership in the AFL, making the BSCP the first African American union in the United States. Randolph withdrew the union from the AFL the following year, however, in protest of ongoing discrimination within the organization, and then turned his attention toward the federal government.

Following the United States' entrance into World War II, Randolph planned a march on Washington to protest discrimination in the war industry workforce. He called off the march after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that banned racial discrimination at government defense factories and established the first Fair Employment Practices Committee.

After World War II, Randolph again took on the federal government by organizing the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation. That group's actions eventually led President Harry S. Truman to issue a 1948 executive order banning racial segregation in the U.S. Armed Forces.

In 1955, Randolph became a vice president of the newly merged entity AFL-CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). He would continue to protest the systemic racial prejudice he found in the organization and thus formed the Negro American Labor Council in 1959. Around this time Randolph also began to devote his energies to broader civil rights work. In 1957, he organized a prayer pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. to draw attention to the delay of school desegregation being implemented in the South.

In 1963, Randolph, along with the other “Big Six”, organized of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, during which he spoke to an integrated crowd of nearly 250,000 supporters. He and remaining “Big Six” memembers were among the handful of civil rights leaders to meet with President John F. Kennedy after the march. With Kennedy discussing the potential Congressional push needed to strengthen the civil rights bill, Randolph told him, "It’s going to be a crusade then. And I think that nobody can lead this crusade but you, Mr. President."

The following year, for these and other civil rights efforts, Randolph was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Soon after, he founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an organization aimed at studying the causes of poverty and co-founded by Randolph's mentee Bayard Rustin. In 1965, at a White House conference, he proposed a poverty-elimination program called the "Freedom Budget for All Americans."

Suffering from a heart condition and high blood pressure, Randolph resigned from his more than 40-year tenure as president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1968. He spent the next few years writing his autobiography until his health worsened, forcing him to stop.

Asa Philip Randolph died in bed at his New York City home on May 16, 1979, at age 90. He was cremated, and his ashes were interred at the A. Philip Randolph Institute in Washington, D.C.