On Labor Day I did something I wasn’t supposed to do… work. I spent the day at the office working on this week’s issue which features articles on the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington when 250,000 Americans converged on the nation’s capital and listened to a youthful Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver one of the most powerful and recognizable speeches of the 20th century, “I Have A Dream.” The complete title of the event was the March on Washington For Jobs & Freedom, and it was the brainchild of labor leader A. Philip Randolph.
As a child I was very familiar with Mr. Randolph and had worked on voter registration campaigns with San Bernardino’s Albert Casey who was the regional president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI). But what I didn’t know about Mr. Randolph was that the concept of a march was a strategy he had used decades before to successfully convince another U.S. president to do the right thing when it came to equal employment opportunities for African-Americans.
During my research I came upon his 1979 New York Times obituary noting his successful confrontations with several U.S. presidents after he led the all-Black International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to victory over a powerful corporation in the late 1930’s. After observing his fiery soapbox street corner rallies in Harlem, the porters tapped him a decade before to organize their union. His victory led to significant gains for the porters, as well as for maids and cooks of the union, and served as the foundational model and blueprint for Black organized labor in the U.S.
On the heels of that victory Mr. Randolph focused his attention on more national labor related issues. Concerned that Blacks would miss an opportunity for good paying wartime employment, he threatened a massive March on Washington if then President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t draft and sign an executive order to keep Blacks from being barred from working in defense plants at the beginning of World War II. The year was 1941. Scheduled for July 1 of that year, Mr. Randolph explained directly to the Administration that over 100,000 people were prepared to participate in the demonstration and a panicked President Roosevelt agreed to meet with the coalition after a series of negotiation attempts failed to stop the scheduled march. Believing he had no other choice, six days before the march, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 and named a Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce it. That March on Washington was cancelled.
Two decades later, in 1963, the March on Washington that we all know about was not used as a threat, it was a show of force and it had a larger focus thanks to a partnership with Dr. King and his civil rights organization. Mr. Randolph along with his protégé and aide Bayard Rustin organized what then was the largest civil rights demonstration to date.
The day of the march, “The Chief”, as he was known in the organized labor world, rose to the microphone and clearly stated the mission of the march, the mission he remained committed to until the day of his death at age 90: “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. This revolution reverberates throughout the land, touching every village where Black men are segregated, oppressed and exploited.”
Fifty years later we reflect on the successes achieved by the leaders of the civil rights movement and while there are still parity issues that need to be resolved, the vision of men like Mr. Randolph must be remembered and celebrated recognizing that Dr. King’s 16 minute “I Have A Dream” speech might not have happened without years of vision and labor by people like A. Philip Randolph.