Of 20th century African-Americans who advanced the cause of democracy, certainly half a dozen and probably more will be as much remembered in two hundred years as Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Crispus Attucks, Ethan Allen, Molly Pitcher, and Nathan Hale are today.
Consider the obvious candidates: Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jackie Robinson, Marian Anderson, Marcus Garvey, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bill Cosby, Lena Horne, Ralph Bunche, Medgar Evers,ß Louie Armstrong, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Duke Ellington, James Baldwin, Ruby Bridges, Roy Wilkins, Nat King Cole, Ralph Ellison, Sammy Davis Jr., Emmett Till, and, certainly not least, A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979).
Randolph, a man of refinement (he spoke like a Shakespearean actor) and unfailing dignity, changed American history on four occasions. First, he was the founder in 1925 and for 43 years the president of the only successful trade union of black workers, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Despite enormous pressure against blacks wielding such power, he got his union accepted into the American Federation of Labor and, in 1937, won recognition from the Pullman Car Company.
Second, he forced President Franklin Roosevelt to open defense-industry and government employment to blacks and other minorities on the eve of World War II. By 1940, America had become, in Roosevelt’s memorable phrase, “the arsenal of democracy.” The nation boomed, building weapons for ourselves and our friends (we hoped only they would have to use them). But Negroes, even skilled carpenters, cement workers, and electricians, were getting only a small percentage of these jobs. Standard Steel Corporation in Kansas City said, “We have not had a Negro worker in 25 years, and do not plan to start now.” An official of the International Association of Machinists at Boeing Aircraft said, “Labor has been asked to make many sacrifices in this war and has made them gladly, but this sacrifice [working alongside blacks] is too great.” A war housing project in Newport, Rhode Island, refused to accept Negro families, announcing in a press release, “In these critical times it is more important than ever to preserve the principle of white supremacy.”
Though only 10 percent of the population, Negroes, in part because they couldn’t get work elsewhere, were 16.1 percent of those enlisting in the military in 1940-41. But they were sent to Jim Crow units or into service and supply duties—kitchen work, truck driving. Randolph and other Negro leaders including Mary McLeod Bethune, a college president and Roosevelt’s special advisor on minority affairs, complained about these injustices to the President and, more often, to his wife, Eleanor. At Mrs. Roosevelt’s prompting, the President, the Navy Secretary, and the Under-secretary of War (our Department of Defense was then called the Department of War) met with Randolph and Walter White, head of the NAACP, and T. Arnold Hill of the Urban League on September 27, 1940. Two weeks after the meeting, the White House issued a statement that the meeting’s participants had agreed to the War department policy: “not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.”
Negroes around the nation were outraged, felt their leaders had sold them out. Randolph announced he was “shocked and amazed” but refrained from publishing the memorandum he and the other black leaders had given the President, calling for immediate integration of the armed forces and colorblind hiring in defense work.
He realized that the time for public statements, however strongly worded, and private meetings with government officials, however cordial, were over. What was needed now was power in the streets, and this could only be achieved through mass action by America’s blacks. On January 15, 1941, he issued a statement to the press: “Negro America must bring its power and pressure to bear upon the agencies and representatives of the Federal government to exact their rights in National Defense employment and the armed forces of the country.” He called for 10,000—later 100,000—black Americans to march together in Washington under the slogan “WE LOYAL NEGRO AMERICAN CITIZENS DEMAND THE RIGHT TO WORK AND FIGHT FOR OUR COUNTRY.”
Today, thanks to Randolph, organized mass meetings in Washington to protest or inspire government action take place every year or so, but one had never happened before. The nearest thing to it was the Bonus March of June-July 1932 when 20,000 World War I veterans, their families and supporters camped out in hovels and got brutally evicted by the U.S. army. Reasonable people were alarmed when Randolph formed his March on Washington Committee and later announced that the event would take place on July 1, a Tuesday. The NAACP and Urban League offered only tepid assistance, and so to persuade the White House that the march would take place and draw thousands of people, Randolph made himself ubiquitous in Harlem, talking it up on the street and in stores, restaurants, pool halls, bars, banks, and beauty shops. He did this not only to tell people about the march but also because he was sure that the FBI was shadowing him and would report how much support he had.
Randolph invited leading New Dealers to address the marchers, including Eleanor Roosevelt and the Secretaries of Labor and War. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote him that the march was a bad idea. President Roosevelt and the Office of Production Management sent letters to defense plants asking them to “take the initiative to open the door of employment to all loyal and qualified workers, regardless of race, creed, or color.” Randolph said that wasn’t enough: he wanted something legally enforceable “with teeth in it.” The White House then enlisted New York City’s liberal mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, an old friend of Randolph’s, to persuade him to call off the march.
La Guardia and Mrs. Roosevelt met with Randolph on June 13. As Randolph remembered:
Mrs. Roosevelt reminded me of her sympathy for the cause of racial justice, and assured me she intended to continue pressuring the President to act. But the march was something else, she said: it just could not go on. Had I considered the problems? she asked. Where would all those thousands of people eat and sleep in Jim Crow Washington?
I told her I myself did not see that as a serious problem. The demonstrators would simply march into the hotels and restaurants, and order food and shelter. But that was just the point, she said; that sort of thing could lead to violence. I replied that there would be no violence unless her husband ordered the police to crack black heads. I told her I was sorry, but the march would not be called off unless the President issued an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industry.
Mrs. Roosevelt and La Guardia reported to the President that the march was going to go ahead unless he himself intervened. Roosevelt called for a June 18 meeting of the march leaders, his principle war advisors, and La Guardia. Until the meeting Randolph was asked to suspend all preparations for the march as a goodwill gesture. He refused. In his excellent 1973 biography of Randolph, Jervis Anderson reconstructs the June 18 meeting:
“Hello, Phil,” the President said. “Which class were you in at Harvard?”
“I never went to Harvard, Mr. President.”
“I was sure you did,” Roosevelt replied. “Anyway, you and I share a kinship in our great interest in human and social justice.”
“That’s right, Mr. President.”
Roosevelt, a man of great charm, had embarked upon one of his favorite filibuster stratagems. But, finding he could not engage Randolph in small talk, he turned raconteur and started regaling his audience with old political anecdotes. Randolph, unfailingly good mannered, allowed himself to be entertained. But the clock was running . . . so, with as much graciousness as he commanded, he broke in:
“Mr. President, time is running on. You are quite busy, I know. But what we want to talk with you about is the problem of jobs for Negroes in defense industries. Our people are being turned away at factory gates because they are colored. They can’t live with this thing. Now, what are you going to do about it?”
“Well, Phil, what do you want me to do?”
“Mr. President, we want you to do something that will enable Negro workers to get work in these plants.”
“Why,” Roosevelt replied, “I surely want them to work, too. I’ll call up the heads of the various defense plants and have them see to it that Negroes are given the same opportunity to work in defense plants as any other citizen in the country.”
“We want you to do more than that,” Randolph said. “We want something concrete, something tangible, definite, positive, and affirmative.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. President, we want you to issue an executive order making it mandatory that Negroes be permitted to work in these plants.”
“Well, Phil,” Roosevelt replied, “you know I can’t do that. If I issue an executive order for you, then there’ll be no end to other groups coming in here and asking me to issue executive orders for them, too. In any event, I couldn’t do anything unless you called off this march of yours. Question like this can’t be settled with a sledge hammer.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President. The march cannot be called off.”
“How many people do you plan to bring?”
“One hundred thousand, Mr. President.”
Roosevelt didn’t believe Randolph. He turned to Walter White, whom he knew better, and said, “Walter, how many people will really march?”
White didn’t blink. He said, “One hundred thousand, Mr. President.”
Anderson, Randolph’s biographer, believes Randolph and White were bluffing: that the march would draw many more than 10,000 people but many less than 100,000.
“You can’t bring 100,000 Negroes to Washington,” Roosevelt said. “Somebody might get killed.”
Randolph said that that was unlikely, especially if the President himself came out and addressed the gathering.
The President was not amused. “Call it off,” he said curtly, “and we’ll talk again.”
Randolph said he had a pledge to honor with his people, and he could not go back to them with anything less than an executive order. Budging somewhat, Roosevelt suggested that Randolph and White confer with his presidential assistants over some way of solving the problem with defense contractors.
“Not defense contractors alone,” Randolph broke in. “The government, too. The government is the worst offender.”
This, Roosevelt seemed to feel, was going a bit too far, and he informed the president of the porters’ union that it was not the policy of the President of the United State to rule, or be ruled, with a gun at his head.
“Then,” Randolph replied, “I shall have to stand by the pledge I’ve made to the people.”
At this point Mayor La Guardia intervened. “Gentlemen, it is clear that Mr. Randolph is not going to call off the march,” he said. “I suggest we all begin to seek a formula”—a compromise both sides could live with.
A committee was appointed to work it out. On behalf of the committee, Joseph Rauh, a young lawyer in the Office for Emergency Management, drew up drafts of an executive order and read them over the phone to Randolph, back in New York preparing for the march. Randolph turned down draft after draft as not strong enough. Finally, Rauh lost patience. “Who the hell is the guy Randolph?” he asked his superiors. “What the hell has he got over the President of the United States?”
On June 25, six days before the march, the President signed an order Randolph accepted: Executive Order 8802 outlawing discrimination in all defense industries and the government, and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee to “investigate complaints of discrimination” and take “appropriate steps to redress grievances.”
Randolph called off the march. When young activists excoriated him for this, Randolph replied: “The Executive Order was issued upon the condition that the march be called off. The march . . . was not to serve as an agency to create a continuous state of sullen unrest and blind resentment among Negroes.” There was enough of that, he said. To have allowed the march go forward “would have promptly and rightly been branded as a lamentable species of infantile leftism and an appeal to sheer prima donna dramatics.”
But Randolph was conscious that he had won from white America only part of what he sought. Negroes were employed in defense industries, but they were still in a segregated military. And here he made his third contribution to our history.
By 1948 it was clear that the U.S. might soon be at war again, this time with the Soviet Union. When President Harry S Truman sent forward a bill renewing the military draft without any mention of desegregation, Randolph saw his chance: he formed the Committee against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training and demanded Truman issue an executive order ending military segregation. On March 22, the President invited Randolph, Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Charles Houston, a lawyer for the NAACP, to discuss the matter. The meeting was friendly until Randolph said, “Mr. President, after making several trips around the country, I can tell you that the mood among Negroes of this country is that they will never bear arms again until all forms of bias and discrimination are abolished.”
“I wish you hadn’t made that statement,” Truman said. “I don’t like it at all.”
“But, Mr. President,” said Charles Houston, “don’t you want to know what is happening in the country?”
Truman said he certainly did; a President was surrounding by people who didn’t tell him the truth.
“Well, that’s what I’m giving you, Mr. President,” Randolph said. “I’ve giving you the facts.”
Truman told him to go ahead.
“Mr. President, as you know, we are calling upon you to issue an executive order abolishing segregation in the armed forces.”
Truman thanked his visitors for coming and said there didn’t seem to be anything more they could “talk fruitfully” about.
Nine days later, Randolph told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “This time Negroes will not take a Jim Crow draft lying down.” He said he would personally “advise Negroes to refuse to fight as slaves for a democracy they cannot possess and cannot enjoy.” He promised a movement of mass peaceful civil disobedience, like Gandhi’s campaign to free India from British rule, and expected the movement to attract not only blacks. “I shall appeal to the thousands of white youths in schools and colleges who are today vigorously shedding the prejudices of their parents and professors. I shall urge them to demonstrate their solidarity with Negro youth by ignoring the entire registration and induction machinery.”
Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a liberal committee member who supported Randolph’s goal, was a former law school professor and was appalled at the means he proposed. Morse and Randolph engaged in a graceful debate that set forth the do-or-die terms under which the Black Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s would take place:
SENATOR MORSE: Your proposal, and put me straight on this, is really based upon conviction that because your Government has not give you certain social, economic, and race protection from discrimination because of race, color, or creed, you feel that even in a time of national emergency when your government and your country itself may be at stake, you are justified in saying to any segment of our populous—whether it is the color group or, as you say in your statement, a white group of like sympathies—that in under those circumstances, you would be justified then in saying, “Do not shoulder arms in protection of your country in this national emergency”?
MR. RANDOLPH: That is a correct statement, Mr. Senator. I may add that it is my deep conviction that in taking such a position we are doing our country a great service. Our country has come out before the world as a moral leader of democracy, and it is preparing its defense forces and aggressive forces upon the theory that it must do this to protect democracy in the world.
Well, now, I consider that if this country does not develop the democratic process at home and make the democratic process work by giving the very people whom they propose to draft in the Army to fight for them democracy, democracy then is not the type of democracy that ought to be fought for, and, as a matter of fact, the policy of segregation in the armed forces and in other avenues of our life is the greatest single propaganda and political weapon in the hands of Russia and international communism today.
SENATOR MORSE: I understand your position, Mr. Randolph, but for the record I want to direct your attention to certain basic legal principles which I want to say, most kindly, are being overlooked in your position. I want to discuss your position from the standpoint of a couple of hypotheticals and relate them to certain legal principles which I think you ought to give very careful consideration to before you follow the course of action which you have indicated.
Let us assume this hypothetical. A country proceeds to attack the United States or commits acts which make it perfectly clear that our choice is only the choice of war. Would you take the position then that unless our Government granted the demands which are set out in your testimony, or most of the demands set out in your testimony, that you could recommend a course of civil disobedience to our Government?
MR. RANDOLPH: In answer to that question, the Government now has time to change its policy on segregation and discrimination, and if the Government does not change its policy on segregation and discrimination in the interests of the very democracy it is fighting for, I would advocate that Negroes take no part in the Army.
SENATOR MORSE: My hypothetical assumes that in the time of emergency set forth in my hypothetical, our Government does not follow in any degree whatsoever the course of action that you recommend.
MR. RANDOLPH: Yes.
SENATOR MORSE: So the facts in the hypothetical then are thrust upon us, and I understand your answer to be that under those circumstances, even though it was perfectly clear that we would have to fight then to exist as a country, you would still recommend the program of civil disobedience?
MR. RANDOLPH: Because I would believe that it is in the best interest of the soul of our country. And I unhesitatingly and very adamantly hold that it is the only way by which we are going to be able to make America wake up and realize that we do not have democracy here as long as one black man is denied all the rights enjoyed by all the white men in this country.
SENATOR MORSE: Now, facing realistically that hypothetical situation and the assumption that it has come to pass, do you have any doubt then that this Government as presently constituted under the Constitution that governs us would necessarily follow a legal course of action of applying the legal doctrine of treason to that conduct? Would you question with me that that is the doctrine that undoubtably will be applied at that time under the circumstances of my hypothetical?
MR. RANDOLPH: I would anticipate nationwide terrorism against Negroes who refuse to participate in the armed forces, but I believe that that is the price we have to pay for the democracy that we want. In other words, if there are sacrifices and sufferings, terrorism, concentration camps, whatever they may be, if that is the only way by which Negroes can get their democratic rights, I unhesitatingly say that we have to face them.åß
SENATOR MORSE: But on the basis of the law as it now exists, going back to my premise that you and I know of no legal exemption from participation in the military service in the defense of our country other than that of conscientious objection on religious grounds, not on the grounds on which you place your civil disobedience, that then the doctrine of treason would be applied to those people participating in that disobedience?
MR. RANDOLPH: Exactly. I would be willing to face that doctrine on the theory and on the grounds that we are serving a Higher Law than the law which applies the act of treason to us when we are attempting to win democracy in this country and to make the soul of America democratic.
I would contend that we are serving a Higher Law than that law with its legal technicalities, which would include the group which fights for democracy even in the face of the crisis you would portray—I would contend that they are serving a Higher Law than that law.
SENATOR MORSE: But you would fully expect that because the law of treason in this country relates to certain specific overt acts on the part of the individual, irrespective of what he considers to be his spiritual or moral motivation and justification, that there would not be any other course of action for our Government to follow but indictments for treason?
MR. RANDOLPH: May I add something there, Mr. Senator?
SENATOR MORSE: First, do you agree with me that that would be certain to follow?
MR. RANDOLPH: Let me add here, in connection with that, that we would participate in no overt acts against our Government, no overt acts of any kind. In other words, ours would be one of non-resistance; ours would be one of non-cooperation; ours would be one of non-participation in the military forces of this country.
I want you to know that we would be willing to absorb the violence, to absorb the terrorism, to face the music and to take whatever comes, and we, as a matter of fact, consider that we are more loyal to our country than the people who perpetrate segregation and discrimination upon Negroes because of race or color.
I want it thoroughly understood that we would certainly not be guilty of any kind of overt act against the country but we would not participate in any military operation as segregated Jim Crow slaves in the Army.
Four months later, on July 26, 1948, not wanting to alienate Negro voters in the North, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 banning segregation in the armed forces.
Seven years later, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a politically active black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give her bus seat to white man and was arrested for violating the city’s Jim Crow laws. Thus began the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the first battle of the Black Revolution that led to the sweeping civil rights laws of the mid-1960s. The boycott was led by the young Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., a disciple of Gandhi and Randolph who understood the force of nonviolent obedience to a Higher Law.
The crowning event of the civil rights movement was the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom during which King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The march, which drew the largest crowd Washington had seen, more than 200,000 people, was Randolph’s idea and his fourth contribution to our history. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he introduced King to the crowd as “the man who personifies the moral leadership of the civil rights revolution.”
The actual march itself, from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, was scheduled to begin at 11:30 a.m. At 11:20 the eager, well-behaved crowd began strolling down the mall in advance of its leaders—who in fact never caught up, the crush of bodies being too thick.
The media was interviewing Randolph and other march dignitaries near the Washington Monument when Randolph noticed the crowd moving and said, according to one reporter, “Wait! That’s my parade.” According to another reporter, he said, “Wait! Those are my people.”
Both were true.
