A. Philip Randolph

A. Philip Randolph built the first successful Black trade union in the United States and twice forced a president to act by threatening a march he never had to hold. He was a Florida tailor's son and a socialist orator in Harlem who founded a magazine, The Messenger, that the Justice Department called the most dangerous of all the Negro publications. In 1925 the Pullman porters asked him to lead their organising drive, because he did not work for the company and so could not be sacked. It took twelve years of harassment, spies and firings before the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters won recognition and a contract in 1937, and the union became a national network of educated, travelled Black men who carried newspapers and organisers along the rail lines. In 1941 he threatened to bring a hundred thousand people to Washington unless defence industries were desegregated; Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 and Randolph called it off, which some allies never forgave. He tried it again in 1948 over the armed forces, urging Black men to refuse conscription, and Truman signed Executive Order 9981. He was the titular head of the 1963 march and gave the opening speech, having wanted such a march for twenty-two years. His argument throughout was that civil rights without economic power was a legal fiction. The porters' union outlasted him and merged into a larger one in 1978. Rosa Parks, E. D. Nixon and much of the Montgomery leadership came out of its network, which is how a labour organisation built in the 1920s supplied the infrastructure for a movement in the 1950s. He is on a statue in Union Station in Washington, standing where his members worked.

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