A. Philip Randolph: Florida Roots, National Force
Near Jacksonville, Florida
Asa Philip Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida, in eighteen eighty-nine, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal minister. His family moved to Jacksonville when he was a child, and he spent his formative years in the city's Black community, absorbing a culture of self-improvement, religious discipline, and simmering awareness of the violence and humiliation that structured daily life in the Jim Crow South. He left for New York as a young man, fell into socialist politics and labor organizing, and in nineteen twenty-five founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Black labor union to win a collective bargaining agreement with a major American corporation.
The Pullman Company had built a business model on underpaying Black workers in a job that offered no path to advancement. Randolph organized those workers over twelve years of sustained campaigning against a company with nearly unlimited resources and a federal government that was, at best, indifferent. In nineteen thirty-seven, the Pullman Company signed.
His career did not stop there. In nineteen forty-one, he threatened a march on Washington by one hundred thousand Black Americans unless Roosevelt desegregated the defense industries, and Roosevelt signed an executive order doing exactly that. In nineteen forty-eight, he pushed President Truman toward the executive order desegregating the military.
In nineteen sixty-three, he was one of the principal organizers of the actual March on Washington. He was seventy-four years old when he stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and introduced the program that ended with Martin Luther King's speech. He grew up in Jacksonville.
That the city does not shout this fact from every corner is one of the small mysteries of American civic memory.
