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Randolph, Asa Philip
6 articles on Randolph, Asa Philip
Randolph, A. Philip
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 3960 Includes: Early Years. | The BSCP and the FEPC. | FBI Surveillance and Civil Rights Activism. | March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. | Bibliography(b. 15 April 1889; d. 16 May 1979), labor organizer, civil rights activist, and editor. A. Philip Randolph was one of the most outspoken and controversial black leaders of his day. Racial empowerment and self-reliance through civil disobedience was the embodiment of his philosophy for advancing the social, political, and human rights of African Americans. Randolph was of the opinion that blacks had the power to overcome the injustices that had been inflicted upon them by a white-dominant and racist segment of the American population but lacked the leadership and organizational structure to achieve their objectives.Randolph consciously crafted strategies to combat racial inequities, devised ways to help advance the struggle for racial equality, and cleverly assembled the black masses into a plan of action to defy legal and cultural constraints designed ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1233 Includes: Bibliography1889–1979
Founder and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters(BSCP), editor of the Messenger, and architect of the March on Washington Movement that led to the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and the 1963 March on Washington. Although many civil rights leaders focused on voting, education, and other governmental functions, Asa Philip Randolph spent his long career as a labor leader working to bring more and better jobs to African Americans. After a long, successful battle to win representation for the nation's Pullman car train porters, Randolph was instrumental in the formation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), which protected African Americans against job discrimination in the defense industries. In addition, Randolph cofounded and edited ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 2207 Includes: Further Reading | Obituary:(15 Apr. 1889–16 May 1979), labor organizer, editor, and activist, was born Asa Philip Randolph in Crescent City, Florida, to Elizabeth Robinson and James Randolph, an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church preacher. In 1891 the Randolphs moved to Jacksonville, where James had been offered the pastorship of a small church. Both Asa Philip and his older brother, James Jr., were talented students who graduated from Cookman Institute (later Bethune-Cookman College), the first high school for African Americans in Florida.Randolph left Florida in 1911, moving to New York to pursue a career as an actor. Between 1912 and 1917 he attended City College, where he was first exposed to the ideas of Karl Marx and political radicalism. He joined the Socialist Party in 1916, attracted to the party's economic ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 388(1889–1979), union head and civil rights leader. A socialist, Asa Philip Randolph saw economic empowerment as the key to African-American advancement, a philosophy he espoused in his Messenger magazine in the 1920s. In 1925 he organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation's first predominantly black union, which he led until 1968. In 1937, Randolph won union recognition from the Pullman Company. Two years earlier, he had become president of the National Negro Congress (NCC), an African-American labor organization created in response to the Great Depression. His experience with communists in the NCC strengthened his anticommunism.In 1941 Randolph threatened a mass protest march in Washington, D.C., that led President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create a Fair Employment Practice Committee ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to American Military History
Word Count: 333(1889–1979), labor and civil rights leader. Born the son of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Randolph was raised in Jacksonville, Florida. Graduating from Cookman Institute in 1911, he moved to New York's Harlem, working and attending City College. In response to increasing segregation and discrimination against blacks, Randolph shunned moderate reform and racial integration, as advocated by W. E. B. Du Bois, and emphasized instead socialism and trade unionism. In 1917, he founded and co-edited the Messenger, a radical monthly magazine, which campaigned against lynching, opposed U.S. participation in World War I, urged African Americans to resist being drafted to fight for a segregated society, and recommended that they join radical unions. In 1918, Woodrow Wilson's postmaster ...
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Source: American National Biography Online
Word Count: 3727 Includes: Bibliographyfounder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and civil rights leader, was born in Crescent City, Florida, the son of James William Randolph, an itinerant African Methodist Episcopal preacher, and Elizabeth Robinson. The family placed great stress on education. Thus Randolph, an honor student, was sent to Cookman Institute in Jacksonville, Florida (later Bethune-Cookman College). Although greatly influenced by his father’s political and racial attitudes, Randolph resisted pressure to enter the ministry and later became an atheist. Upon graduation from Cookman, in 1907, he found himself barred by racial prejudice from all but manual labor jobs in the ...
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