A. Philip Randolph – Biography, Activism & March on Washington

A. Philip Randolph was a labor leader and civil rights activist who founded the country’s first large black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) in 1925. In the 1930s, his organizing efforts helped to end both racial discrimination in the defense industries and segregation in the US military. Randolph was also a major organizer of the March on Washington in 1963, which paved the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act the following year.

Early childhood and moving to Harlem

Asa Philip Randolph was born April 15, 1889 in Crescent City, Florida, where his father was a preacher of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He grew up in an intellectual home, and Randoph and his older brother both studied at the Cookman Institute in Jacksonville, a Methodist school founded during Reconstruction as Florida’s first all-black higher education institution.

Inspired by the writings of leading black intellectual WEB Du Bois, Randolph moved to New York in 1911. He moved to Harlem, where he found a job as a switchboard operator in a building and enrolled in classes in the City. College of New York. . Randolph’s dedication to the socialist cause led to employment for the Brotherhood of Labor, an employment agency for black workers. In 1914 he married Lucille Green, a young widow who graduated from Howard University who owned a beauty salon in the building where he worked.

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