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Asa Philip Randolph
Origin: Crescent City, Florida
(April 5, 1889 - May 16, 1979)
Heroic Values: Achievement, Caring, Courage, Integrity, Perseverance, Selflessness, Tolerance, Vision
Background
On August 28, 1963, 250,000 civil rights devotees assembled on the mall surrounding the Lincoln Memorial. They came to the nation’s capital to participate in one of the largest nonviolent demonstrations in history. Most Americans remember the event for its closing address, delivered by a thirty-four-year-old southern Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have a Dream,” King told the country, that day. But it was Asa Philip Randolph’s dream for a peaceful labor protest that inspired a quarter of a million people to leave their homes and journey to Washington, D.C.
A labor leader and civil-rights activist, Randolph had conceived the march twenty years earlier. In 1925, Randolph formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African American trade union, to bargain for improved working conditions for the porters of the Pullman Company. He began organizing the March on Washington Movement in 1941 to protest discriminatory hiring practices in the wartime defense industry. Having devised the demonstration to pressure Franklin D. Roosevelt to intervene, Randolph called it off when the president at last issued an executive order barring discrimination in both armament industries and federal agencies.
In 1962, the country suffered an economic recession. Twice as many African Americans were unemployed than whites; over one and a half million African Americans were looking for work. Two decades after he initially envisioned his march on the capital, Randolph again contemplated an epic Washington rally. Now an older man in his seventies, he began talking to long-time friend and strategist Bayard Rustin about a massive but peaceful protest.
Meanwhile, events in 1963, the year marking the Emancipation Proclamation’s centennial anniversary, caused Martin Luther King, Jr., to contemplate his own grand demonstration. That spring, police in Birmingham, Alabama, arrested King for marching in a parade, held him in solitary confinement, and refused his right to legal counsel. In June, President John F. Kennedy sent Congress a civil rights bill. King knew a large televised demonstration in Washington could impel Congress to endorse the legislation, and he instructed his aides to approach Randolph about collaborating.
Randolph and Rustin originally planned to lobby for a new federal jobs program and a higher minimum wage. But the newsworthiness surrounding King’s Birmingham incarceration, and the urgency of the pending Kennedy bill expanded their agenda. Appropriately, they named the protest the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”
Critics and supporters alike tried to persuade Randolph to cancel the march. Although he publicly supported the demonstration, Kennedy privately warned, “We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol. Some of these people are looking for an excuse to be against us; and I don’t want to give any of them a chance to say ‘Yes, I’m for the bill, but I am damned if I will vote for it at the point of a gun.’” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover tried to dampen support for the rally by defaming King and Rustin. And on the morning of the march, Hoover ordered his agents to telephone known celebrity participants and advise them to withdraw. But Randolph had waited long enough.
Demonstrators came to Washington by car, bus, train, and airplane. Although the marchers were predominantly African American, people of all races, religions, and social standings participated. Whereas some public figures and luminaries attended, most participants were everyday people—standing in what King later called “majestic dignity.” All three major networks televised the march, one of the first events broadcast live via satellite around the world.
Randolph opened the program by saying, “Fellow Americans, we are gathered here in the largest demonstration in the history of this nation. 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 guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.”
Critics forecasted riots, but those fears proved unwarranted. Political commentator Russell Baker noted the civility of the enormous, diverse congregation, writing in the New York Times, “No one could remember an invading army quite as gentle as the two hundred thousand civil-rights marchers who occupied Washington today. The sweetness and patience of the crowd may have set some sort of national high-water mark in mass decency.”
After the marchers left the Mall, Rustin found Randolph standing alone on the stage. “Mr. Randolph,” said Rustin, “it looks like your dream has come true.” Through his tears, Asa Philip Randolph proclaimed it “the most beautiful and glorious day” of his life.
Submitted by: George Brymer
Sources
Wikipedia
The online encyclopedia
AFL-CIO
Union history
About.com
A collection of Philip resources