{"id":49572,"date":"2026-08-06T11:46:59","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T18:46:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=49572"},"modified":"2026-08-06T13:40:03","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T20:40:03","slug":"a-philip-randolph-socialist-on-the-march","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2026\/08\/06\/a-philip-randolph-socialist-on-the-march\/","title":{"rendered":"A. Philip Randolph: Socialist on the March"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Illustration
Credit: Illustration by Lyndon Hayes for The American Prospect<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Posted in Civil Rights in America<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A. Philip Randolph led Black workers and won defining civil rights victories over a career spanning 60 turbulent years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Haroldby Harold Meyerson<\/a><\/strong> August 5, 2026 (Prospect.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article appears in the August 2026<\/a> issue of<\/em> The American Prospect magazine.<\/em> If you\u2019d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It wasn\u2019t the job opportunities that brought him to Harlem. Had he been white, Asa Philip Randolph, then 21 years old, had the kind of background that would have ensured gainful employment when he moved north from Florida in 1911: a stellar academic record, parents who\u2019d made sure he knew not just his Bible but Shakespeare and other classics, an orator\u2019s voice, a quiet though commanding presence, Victorian manners, a moral seriousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More from Harold Meyerson<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Randolph understood this meant little to nothing in New York\u2019s job market for Black Americans, where he got work\u2014more accurately, gigs\u2014as a janitor and occasional waiter. That\u2019s not why he\u2019d come to Gotham. He\u2019d come to exercise his acting chops in Black amateur theater clubs; to study politics, economics, and public speaking at City College; and, soon after his arrival, to immerse himself in the socialist movement, then at its Debsian apogee. His minister father disapproved of his acting proclivities. But Randolph found an outlet for his talents on the street corners and soapboxes of Harlem, preaching socialist gospel to Harlem\u2019s Black working class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Randolph was to remain a socialist soapboxer for the next 60 years, during which he did more to advance the rights and interests of Black Americans than anyone else in the half-century between the heyday of W.E.B. Du Bois and the emergence of Martin Luther King. He also had more impact on America\u2019s laws and social policies than any other avowed democratic socialist in the nation\u2019s history, though we must hope, as Randolph surely would, that the wave of socialists who\u2019ve emerged in the past decade will eclipse him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Randolph used his ability to rally his supporters to make lasting change for Black America.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

During his early soapboxing, Randolph met another young Black socialist, Chandler Owen. The two of them \u201ctook up residence in the New York Public Library,\u201d says historian Eric Arnesen, where they read Marx, political economy, history, and sociology. In early 1917, they founded and co-edited The Messenger<\/em>, a monthly magazine that in bold type proclaimed itself to be \u201cThe Only Radical Negro Magazine in America.\u201d It vehemently opposed U.S. participation in World War I, pointing out that if democracy was truly at stake, that was a battle that needed to be fought at home. In 1919, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer labeled the magazine \u201cthe most dangerous of all the Negro publications.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As if Randolph and Owen weren\u2019t already in hot water, they embarked on a national anti-war speaking tour of Black communities. They were arrested in Cleveland and charged, like socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, with subversion. Amazingly, the presiding judge looked at the two twentysomethings and apparently concluded that they were some crazy Black kids who didn\u2019t understand what they\u2019d been talking about. He gave them a lecture and sent them home, not realizing that home was The Messenger<\/em>\u2019s Harlem office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IT WASN\u2019T JUST THE WAR<\/strong> against which The Messenger<\/em> railed. It was capitalism; it was Tammany; it was the Republicans who campaigned in Harlem as Lincoln\u2019s party while doing nothing for Black citizens; it was Black churches that preached submission or accommodation; it was Du Bois\u2019s support for World War I; and in the 1920s, it was Marcus Garvey\u2019s Back to Africa movement, which for many Harlemites combined an assertion of Black pride with a weakness for spectacle and a de facto surrender in the struggle for equality on American soil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides writing and editing The Messenger<\/em>, Randolph also organized fledgling unions of New York\u2019s elevator operators (almost entirely Black) and Virginia\u2019s Black shipyard workers. Both ventures failed, but in 1925, five Pullman porters called on him to talk about forming a union. In the decades following the Civil War, George Pullman had founded a company that both manufactured passenger railcars and staffed them with servants to meet the travelers\u2019 many needs. That task, he decided, had to be performed with cheerful servility, to which end he employed an all-Black workforce, initially former slaves who\u2019d worked in the homes, not the fields, of their enslavers. Few companies were hiring them at all, and Pullman quickly became the largest employer of Black people in the U.S., remaining so until the late 1930s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1925, it was mostly a younger generation of Black workers who staffed the cars, but the same cheerful servility was required of them, which came complete with low pay and the requirement to work all hours depending on passengers\u2019 needs or whims. (Many porters worked up to 400 hours per month.) Travel broadened the porters\u2019 horizons, even with all the restrictions they encountered at every stop, but nothing broadened the porters\u2019 rights or narrowed their hours or raised their wages. Pullman had established a company-controlled union which provided nothing to improve the porters\u2019 lot. It also deployed a small army of spies to ensure that no real union would arise to challenge it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A.
A. Philip Randolph talks to newsmen at the Capitol after leaders of the March on Washington met with congressional leaders, August 28, 1963. Credit: AP Photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Randolph accepted the challenge to head a real union, named the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, riding the rails himself to persuade prospective members with his eloquence and demonstrable commitment. The company\u2019s main mode of union suppression was simple termination: The company fired roughly 800 porters who its spies reported were union supporters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1926, however, the porters became the unintended beneficiary of federal legislation. That year, Congress passed the Railway Labor Act, giving collective-bargaining rights to railroad engineers, conductors, and brakemen\u2014all of whom had all-white unions that avidly enforced their color lines. But the act failed to exclude porters; in 1926, hardly any congressmen even knew there was an effort to unionize them. That opened a door for Randolph and his members, though fear of company reprisal still made unionization a slog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took the New Deal for unions to start growing again. Still, few expected the porters to dislodge the company\u2019s \u201cunion\u201d with their own. But in 1935, the government conducted an election between the company union and the Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood won by a vote of 5,931 to 1,422. Not since Reconstruction had Black Americans won anything of comparable significance; the Black press rejoiced and hailed Randolph as the pre-eminent Black leader of the day. Even greater recognition followed in 1937, when the Pullman company, after two years of hoping the union could be dislodged, abruptly agreed to the union\u2019s proposals for pay and hours and signed a contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1940, as the specter of war loomed over America, the government boosted funding for production of arms and aircraft (in which the U.S. was singularly lacking). Suddenly, the rather small corporations that built planes\u2014Lockheed, Douglas, North American, Boeing\u2014were growing exponentially. By January 1941, they employed 107,000 workers, of whom just 240 were Black. Randolph met with President Roosevelt, who said he\u2019d encourage the companies to hire more Black workers, but committed himself to nothing further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joined by the union\u2019s gruff vice president, Milton Webster, Randolph boarded a southbound train to meet with various porter locals. The two sat in silence as they contemplated how to persuade FDR to compel the companies to integrate. Finally, Randolph said, \u201cI think we ought to get 10,000 Negroes and march down Pennsylvania Avenue and protest against the discriminatory practices\u201d of the aircraft and other arms companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time, there\u2019d been no mass protests in Washington since the \u201cBonus Army\u201d of World War I veterans had demanded immediate payment of their veterans\u2019 benefits in 1932\u2014the pit of the Depression. (President Hoover had deployed the U.S. Army to dispel them.) Marches on Washington to promote lasting policy changes\u2014much less Black marches on Washington, which practiced Jim Crow segregation in virtually all its public facilities\u2014were unheard of. But Randolph and Webster\u2019s visits to Northern state locals yielded so much enthusiastic support, far beyond the members of their union, that by late spring, more than 100,000 Black people had pledged to march, alarming the administration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two of Randolph\u2019s most prominent and most liberal white allies\u2014first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia\u2014tried in vain to get him to stop the march, and then compelled him to hold another meeting with FDR. \u201cWhat was your class at Harvard, Phil?\u201d asked Roosevelt, turning on his fabled charm. Randolph responded by noting his regret that he wasn\u2019t a Harvard man, and told FDR that the Black community had been galvanized and could not be dissuaded from marching, absent an executive order requiring defense contractors to cease racial discrimination in hiring and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce it. Roosevelt acceded, and Randolph then called off the march. Nonetheless, he led a series of mass rallies in major cities for several years thereafter to both mark and publicize this epochal change. And Black citizens, by the thousands and then the millions, moved from the South to Northern and Western cities for the jobs now open to them in defense plants\u2014a demographic shift with huge implications for the nation and its politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BY THEN, RANDOLPH WAS RECOGNIZED<\/strong> as the pre-eminent champion of the Black American cause, with the Amsterdam News<\/em> proclaiming him \u201cranked along with the great Frederick Douglass.\u201d He used his ability to rally his supporters to make more lasting change for Black America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As mentor to the emerging postwar generation of Black radicals, he presided over the conception and planning of the first Freedom Rides (integrated bus rides through the Jim Crow South) in 1946, alongside Bayard Rustin and future CORE leader James Farmer\u2014though the plans weren\u2019t carried out until 1961. In 1948, as Congress considered establishing a peacetime draft, he announced he\u2019d counsel young Black men to resist the draft through a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience unless the armed forces were desegregated. As he had with Roosevelt, he met with President Truman, who responded with indignation\u2014before realizing that the movement of Black people to Northern and Western states in response to Randolph\u2019s previous campaign meant that desegregating the armed forces could actually help him win some swing states in the upcoming 1948 election. Truman then signed the desegregating executive order, and in the final week of his come-from-behind re-election campaign became the first president ever to hold a campaign rally in Harlem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Magazine
The Messenger<\/em> was an early, radical magazine that Randolph co-founded; by the 1960s, he graced newsweekly covers and met with presidents like JFK (below). Credit: Black Liberation History Archive\/Marxists\u2019 Internet Archive; Library of Congress<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"President
Credit: UPI\/Cecil Stoughton\/White House\/John F. Kennedy Library<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Randolph not only incubated the careers of Rustin and Farmer, but helped hone the political talents of many members of the Brotherhood. One of them, E.D. Nixon, became the leader of the NAACP in Montgomery, Alabama, whose Jim Crow regime, he believed, was vulnerable to the kind of nonviolent confrontational tactics that Randolph had used. Several local Black citizens had provoked arrest by refusing to comply with a requirement on city buses to move to the back, but Nixon declined to call a boycott, until in 1955 he found and deployed a model resister named Rosa Parks. Nixon then dragooned the new minister at the city\u2019s largest Black church\u201426-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.\u2014to lead the campaign. Randolph\u2019s tutelage continued to shape campaigns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In late 1962, Randolph told Rustin it might be time to mount a March on Washington. Factory employment was dropping due to increased mechanization, causing Black unemployment to rise. The 1958 elections had greatly increased the number of liberals in Congress, and following the 1960 election, there was again a Democrat in the White House. Moreover, civil rights campaigns in Southern cities against pervasive segregation looked to be hitting a wall. So Randolph announced a march, focused on the provision of jobs that would arrest the urban Black descent into poverty, boosting the prospects of white workers as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then King\u2019s campaign for equal rights in Birmingham, Alabama, exploded as television news showed the local police turning dogs and fire hoses on teens and children who were demonstrating for a decent, desegregated life. President Kennedy was compelled to call for federal legislation striking down racial discrimination in public facilities. \u201cIt was a magnificent speech,\u201d Randolph said, \u201cbut it was, unfortunately, made rather late.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, then agreed to participate in Randolph\u2019s march, and both the NAACP and the Urban League cautiously agreed to join as well, despite their general aversion to public demonstrations. (NAACP chief Roy Wilkins demanded that Rustin\u2014a liability, he said, for having once been a communist, however briefly, and for still being gay\u2014be removed as the march director. Randolph responded by proclaiming that he\u2019d chair the march himself but keep Rustin as its organizer, to which the boxed-in Wilkins felt compelled to agree.) Kennedy called in the leaders to meet with him in June and, like Roosevelt and Truman before him, asked that they not hold the protest. For the third time, Randolph responded by telling a president that the forces were in motion and could not be deterred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The march, of course, was a historic success, creating such momentum that the Civil Rights Act that passed the following year went beyond Kennedy\u2019s proposal to include a prohibition on discrimination in hiring\u2014a broader version of the policy Randolph had secured, temporarily, during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still a dedicated socialist, Randolph welcomed the Great Society\u2019s War on Poverty, while seeking to remedy its inadequacies by having progressive economists devise the \u201cFreedom Budget\u201d in 1966, which demonstrated how government-backed full-employment policies could truly eliminate American poverty. These policies, of course, have yet to be enacted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Randolph died in 1979, until his final years still residing in a modest Harlem walk-up apartment. While his life and work have never been totally forgotten, they\u2019ve fallen through the cracks of historical memory. A modest statue of him can be found in Washington\u2019s Union Station, where porters once staffed the railcars. No monument truly reflects the impact of his work and the egalitarian decency it bestowed\u2014provisionally, of course\u2014on his country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Herewith, then, a modest suggestion: The next time that Democrats control the federal government, they should rename Union Station\u2014that majestic, Daniel Burnham greeting hall of all who come to Washington by rail\u2014after the man who both championed rail workers and led those who flowed through it to march on Washington for justice. The A. Philip Randolph Station.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before you go.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I hope that you found this article interesting and thought-provoking. The reason we\u2019re able to publish stories like this \u2014 free of programmatic ads and never behind a paywall \u2014 is because readers like you step up to support our work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"David<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

David Dayen<\/strong>
Executive Editor<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article appears in Aug 2026 issue<\/a>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harold Meyerson<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

hmeyerson@prospect.org<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect. More by Harold Meyerson<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Posted in Civil Rights in America A. Philip Randolph led Black workers and won defining civil rights victories over a career spanning 60 turbulent years. by Harold Meyerson August 5, 2026 (Prospect.org) This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you\u2019d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox,… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2312],"tags":[2338],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49572"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49572"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49581,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49572\/revisions\/49581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}