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Turn of the Century · Labor

A. Philip Randolph

1889 – 1979

Founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. His 1941 march threat won Executive Order 8802; he led the 1963 March on Washington.

A. Philip Randolph, head-and-shoulders portrait in jacket and tie, photographed in Washington, D.C., in November 1942
Gordon Parks for the Office of War Information, November 1942. Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

A. Philip Randolph organized the Pullman Company’s Black sleeping-car porters into a union, won a contract after a twelve-year fight, and then turned the tactics of the labor movement on the federal government. His threat of a mass march on Washington in 1941 forced the first presidential order against employment discrimination since Reconstruction, his campaign against the segregated military helped produce Truman’s 1948 desegregation order, and in 1963 he stood at the head of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

At a Glance

Born
15 April 1889, Crescent City, Florida
Died
16 May 1979, New York, New York
Birth name
Asa Philip Randolph
Known for
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (1925) and its 1937 Pullman contract; the March on Washington Movement and Executive Order 8802 (1941); director of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
HBCU ties
Bethune-Cookman University (Attended the Cookman Institute in Jacksonville, one of the schools that later merged to form Bethune-Cookman)
Fields
Labor · Civil Rights · Organizing · Journalism
Era
Turn of the Century

Early Life

Asa Philip Randolph was born on 15 April 1889 in Crescent City, Florida, the younger son of James William Randolph, a tailor and minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Elizabeth Robinson Randolph, a seamstress. In 1891 the family moved to Jacksonville, where the boys grew up in a household that prized reading, oratory, and racial self-respect; his father took them to hear Black officeholders and, by family account, once stood guard at the county jail with Elizabeth to prevent a lynching.

Randolph attended the Cookman Institute in Jacksonville, one of the few academic high schools open to Black students in Florida, where he excelled in literature, drama, and public speaking. Seeing few prospects in the Jim Crow South, he moved to New York in 1911, settling in Harlem. He worked a series of menial jobs, took evening classes at the City College of New York, and was drawn to socialism, joining the Socialist Party. In 1914 he married Lucille Campbell Green, a widow and successful Harlem beautician whose income helped sustain his political work.

Life and Work

In 1917 Randolph and his friend Chandler Owen founded The Messenger, a socialist monthly that opposed Black participation in the First World War, attacked lynching and segregation, and urged Black workers to join interracial unions. Its antiwar stance drew the attention of federal authorities, and it became one of the leading radical journals of the Harlem Renaissance. In the early 1920s the magazine also led the “Garvey Must Go” campaign against Marcus Garvey.

In 1925 a group of Pullman porters asked Randolph, who did not work for the company and so could not be fired by it, to lead their organizing drive. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was launched at a meeting in Harlem on 25 August 1925. The Pullman Company, among the largest employers of Black men in the country, responded with spies, firings, and a company union. Randolph held the Brotherhood together through the Depression; the Railway Labor Act amendments of 1934 finally gave porters the right to choose a bargaining agent, and in 1935 the union won a representation election and an international charter from the American Federation of Labor. On 25 August 1937, twelve years to the day after its founding, the Brotherhood signed a contract with Pullman that brought higher wages, shorter hours, and grievance procedures — a landmark agreement between a Black-led union and a major American corporation.

As the nation rearmed in 1940 and 1941, defense employers and the armed forces excluded or segregated Black workers. Randolph called for a march on Washington by as many as 100,000 Black Americans. With the march set for 1 July, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on 25 June 1941, barring discrimination in defense industries and government on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin and creating the Committee on Fair Employment Practice. Randolph called off the march but kept the March on Washington Movement alive as an all-Black organization committed to mass, nonviolent pressure.

After the war he took aim at the segregated military. With Grant Reynolds he organized the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training and the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience, and in 1948 he told a Senate committee that he would urge young Black men to refuse induction into a segregated army. On 26 July 1948 President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981, calling for equal treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. When the AFL and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955, Randolph became a vice president and member of the executive council of the AFL-CIO, where he pressed unions to end their own racial exclusion. He also led the Negro American Labor Council, formed at the end of the decade to press that fight.

Randolph co-organized the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom with Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins. In 1963 he revived his old idea of a mass march, enlisted his longtime protege Bayard Rustin as deputy director, and served as director of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28 August 1963. He opened the program at the Lincoln Memorial, and the march’s demands joined civil rights to full employment and a higher minimum wage.

Legacy

President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Randolph the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In 1965 he and Rustin founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute to build ties between the civil rights and labor movements, and he stepped down as president of the Brotherhood in 1968. Lucille Randolph died in 1963. Randolph died at his home in New York City on 16 May 1979, at 90.

Historians describe Randolph as the link between the Black labor radicalism of the 1920s and the mass civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His central insight — that organized, disciplined mass pressure could compel federal action, and that civil rights were inseparable from economic rights — shaped the strategy of the movement that followed. The Brotherhood itself merged into the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks in 1978, and the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum in Chicago preserves the porters’ history.

For Educators

Organized, disciplined mass pressure — even the credible threat of it — can compel government action, and Randolph insisted that civil rights and economic rights could not be separated. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. 15 April 1889 Born in Crescent City, Florida.
  2. 1911 Moves to New York and settles in Harlem.
  3. 1917 Co-founds The Messenger with Chandler Owen.
  4. 25 August 1925 Launches the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
  5. 25 August 1937 The Brotherhood signs its first contract with the Pullman Company.
  6. 25 June 1941 Roosevelt issues Executive Order 8802; Randolph calls off the planned march.
  7. 26 July 1948 Truman issues Executive Order 9981 after Randolph’s civil-disobedience campaign.
  8. 1955 Becomes a vice president of the newly merged AFL-CIO.
  9. 28 August 1963 Leads the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as its director.
  10. 16 May 1979 Dies in New York City.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
  2. Paula F. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).
  3. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, “Randolph, A. Philip.” Link
  4. National Archives, “Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry (1941).” Link
  5. Library of Congress, “A. Philip Randolph, Labor & Civil Rights Activist Born,” This Month in Business History. Link
  6. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, A. Philip Randolph Papers. Link

Related on Black-History.com

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Black-History.com Editors. (2026, September 30). A. Philip Randolph. Black-History.com. https://black-history.com/people/a-philip-randolph/
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Editorial Note

By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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