A. Philip Randolph

A sk most people who led the 1963 March on Washington and they'll probably tell you Martin Luther King, Jr. But the real force behind the event was the man many call the pre-eminent black labor leader of the century and the father of the modern civil rights movement: A. Philip Randolph.

Randolph believed that economic rights was the key to advancing civil rights.

Randolph was born in the deeply segregated South in 1889. When despite his outstanding academic record he was reduced to menial labor, he headed North - to Harlem. The film traces Randolph's early years amongst the fervor of the Harlem Renaissance where he encountered the socialism of Eugene Debs, became a renowned soapbox orator and, with Chandler Owen, founded the radical magazine, The Messenger.

In response to the race riots of 1919, Randolph and Owen formed the National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unionism Among Negroes. Soon a group of Pullman car workers asked Randolph to help them organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The film revisits their bitter 12-year battle through the Great Depression with the notorious Pullman Company which tried to destroy their union using spies and firings. The 1934 Wagner Act finally created a level playing field enabling the Brotherhood to win a contract in 1937, the first ever between a company and a black union.

 Randolph became the sole black representative on the AFL's executive council where he was often a lonely voice for civil rights.

When WWII began, the federal government was still segregated and African Americans excluded from all but menial defense industry jobs. Randolph leaped onto the national stage when he called for a March on Washington in protest. According to CORE founder James Farmer, "Roosevelt could not take the chance that 25 ,000 people would be protesting in Washington when he was calling the U.S. the arsenal of democracy." Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8002 banning such discrimination and the march was called off.

As the Cold War heated up, President Truman announced the first peace-time draft. But the armed forces would remain segregated. Randolph called on black men to resist the draft until Truman relented, presaging the protests against the Vietnam War. Truman was furious, but in 1948 he issued the executive order integrating the military.

In 1963, Randolph called again for a March on Washington. He was the only civil rights leader who could get the others to unite. 250,000 came in response. When he introduced Dr. King, "symbolically, the torch was passed from one generation of fighters to another."

BOOKS ABOUT RANDOLPH

• A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait
• Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America

A. Philip Randolph Quotes

What A. Philip Randolph Had To Say

Labor and Civil Rights

The very nature of a struggle on the part of labor and minorities . . . renders it inevitable that labor and minorities join the camp of and stand by and for the forces of democracy. For it is only within the framework of democracy that labor and minorities can achieve freedom, equality and justice.

- A. Philip Randolph, To the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

The labor movement has been the home of the working man, and traditionally, it has been the only haven for the dispossessed; and therefore, I have tried to build an alliance between the Negro and the American labor movement.

We must have faith that this society, divided by ethnicity and by class, and subject to profound social pressures, can one day become a nation of equals, and banish ethnic prejudices to the limbo of oblivion from which it shall never emerge.

Salvation for race, nation, or class must come from within. Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted. Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and races, and the struggle must be continuous; for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human social economic, political, and religious relationships.

- A. Philip Randolph, 80th Birthday Dinner Waldorf Astoria Hotel. New York, May 6. 1969

At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can't take anything, you won't get anything, and if you can't hold anything, you won't keep anything. And you can't take anything without organization.

-A. Philip Randolph

In concert with their fellow workers, black people can take decisive control of their own destinies; with a union, they can approach their employers as proud and upright equals, not as trembling and bowing slaves. Indeed, a solid union contract is, in a very real sense, another Emancipation Proclamation.

-A. Philip Randolph

The labor movement cannot afford to measure its achievements in the field of racial justice by standards of other institutions. As a force for social progress, we have always prided ourselves on being in the forefront. Similarly, in assessing labor 's contribution to civil rights, it is not enough to measure how far we have come; it is not enough to compare ourselves favorably with government or management. We must measure our achievements against the needs of our time, the demands of our democratic creed, the imperatives of the Judeo-Christian traditions.

-A. Philip Randolph, AFL-CIO Convention New York 1963.

There can be no solidarity if one is considered a Black Worker and another a White Worker. We should be considered just a worker.

-A. Philp Randolph, Founding Conference of the Negro Labor Committee. New York City, July 20. 1935

The passing of slavery did not result in the complete emancipation of the Negro worker. As a matter of fact, the Civil War was not a complete revolution. It did not bring to the workers universal suffrage, the right to participation in the public school system in the democratic parliamentary structure. More than any other groups in America, Negroes need to develop economic strength and organize with white workers to fight and abolish all forms that attack their rights as workers.

- A. Philp Randolph, Founding Conference of the Negro Labor Committee. New York City. July 20. 1935

We... are not interested in Negroes getting more work, Negroes have too much work already. What we want Negroes to get is less work and more wages...

- A. Philip Randolph

March on Washington

Let the nation and the world know the meaning of our numbers. We are not a pressure group, we are not an organization or a group of organizations, we are not a mob. We are the advance group of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom... But this civil rights revolution is not confined to the Negro, nor is it confined to civil rights, for our white allies know they cannot be free while we are not, and we know we have no future in a society in which six million black and white people are unemployed and millions live in poverty... We want a free democratic society dedicated to the political, economic, and social advancement of man along moral lines... The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality. It falls to the Negro to reassert this priority of values, because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property. It falls to us to demand full employment and to put automation at the service of human needs, not at the service of profits...All who deplore our militancy, who exhort patience in the name of false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice.

-A. Philip Randolph, The March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28. 1963

The Future

The reconstruction program for the Negro must involve the introduction of the new social order - a democratic order in which human rights are recognized above property rights.

- A. Philp Randolph, THE MESSENGER Newspaper 1919

May God give us the strength, faith, courage, and will never to ponder to the evil, vicious, and anti-social and dangerous spirit of black racism or white racism, or anti-Semitism, but that we shall ever fight to achieve and maintain freedom, justice, and equality, peace, and plenty for all

- A. Philp Randolph, Address at the 23rd Annual Dinner of the Liberal Party on New York State. October 11. 1967

The youngsters of today must direct their attention not only to the matter of racial identity and racial realization through African Studies, but they must make certain they are not left behind in the scientific and technological revolution, because if they are, they will be in a hopeless state. There will be absolutely no way in the world whereby they can become an effective force. If the young Negro cannot become a part of this advancing technology, his whole revolution will have been in vain.

- A. Philip Randolph, EBONY Magazine May 1969

What Others Had To Say About A. Philip Randolph

After a year of Birmingham demonstrations. . . it became clear to him [Randolph] that unless there was a March on Washington that summer there might be riots all over the United States. There had to be a civil rights bill. There had to be a voters' rights bill . . . And Randolph was the only civil rights leader at that point who could in fact get all the rest of them to come into the same room...neither Jim Farmer nor Roy Wilkins, nor Whitney Young, nor Dr. King would ignore a call from A. Philip Randolph.

- Rachelle Horowitz, Bayard Rustin's Assistant

Today there are millions of men and women who are leading happier lives, who have opportunities that they never would have had were it not forRandolph. They don't even know his name, but he has transformed this country for the better.

- Arnold Aronson, Former Member of the Socialist Party

If he [Randolph] had been born in another period, maybe of another color, he probably would have been President. In another land he probably would have been, maybe, Prime Minister . . . . But in a real sense, he was head of the building of a new nation, of a better America.

- John Lewis, Congressman (D - Georgia)

He stands at the pinnacle of leadership, performing tasks that certainly no one . . . not even Martin Luther King could do. Tasks that involved putting coalitions together, challenging the Government, making demands and standing firm until those demands were acceded to.

- John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus

[A. Philip Randolph was] the greatest black man we had in the last 100 years. The civil rights movement saw to it that black people were able to do things legally, like ride on a Pullman car. But the labor movement saw to it that black people had the money to buy the ticket to ride on the Pullman cars.

- E.D. Nixon, Pullman porter and organizer of 1962 Montgomery bus boycott

It is hard to make anyone who has never met him believe that A. Philip Randolph must be the greatest man who has lived in the U.S. in this century. But it is harder yet to make anyone who has ever known him believe anything else.

- Murray Kempton, Journalist